I just acquired my first true Mac product – a new MacBook Air with M4 – and have been blithely planning to start running Quicken on it instead of on my PC. Then I discovered that the Quicken data file conversion fails, and when I dig into the situation I find to my horror that Quicken Support can’t help!! If the file fails “Validate”, you’re basically SOL – it’s unbelievable that they are unable to write code that can clean up a data file, but there it is.
SO. I have two choices: starting over from scratch is fine except recreating manually all the million and one details, like categories, tags, and reports is not trivial – many hours work. Also it is impossible to recover 20 years of accumulated data. What about a backup? Well, yes, I got backups, but none of them validate either, even going back a long time!
Which leads me, very reluctantly, to the idea of running Windows in a VM so I can run my existing Quicken file, which by the way, works perfectly well on Windows, despite being “corrupt”. The idea of going over to a Mac was of course to get away from Windows, but I have to evaluate the idea further I guess.
Folks on this site have praised Parallels so I took a read about that, and they do support the M4 architecture but only Windows 11 (adding insult to injury! 🙂 ). It’s not cheap – $99 a year subscription, but as far as I’ve been able to discover, no other VM product supports the M4 chip yet.
Advice and recommendations welcome!