December 22nd, 2008
Parallels ate my virtual machine
Must be a bad night. Shortly after I determined that Firefox 3.0.5 is unusable on my Mac, Parallels ate my virtual machine.
The back story is that I use Parallels Desktop primarily for one task: accounting. The Windows version of QuickBooks is light years ahead of the Mac version – at least in QB 2008 – which can’t do something as simple as download bank transactions. Instead I have to go to my bank’s Web site, download my transactions then import them into QB for Mac. It sounds trivial but when once you’ve done this the automated way in QB Windows (which remembers which accounts to apply to which vendors, etc.) there’s just no going back.
(I wonder if QuickBooks 2009 for the Mac is any better?)
Tonight in an attempt to do a little end-of-year accounting I was greeted by this message when I launched Parallels 4.0:
Lovely.
Notice how the offending dialog doesn’t say, “Would you like to attempt to salvage your data?”
Or, “Would you like to repair the file?”
Or, “Would you like to save the virtual machine for diagnosis?”
Or even, “Here are some guesses about what may have happened.”
Just “your files are corrupted - we’ll throw them away for you.”
Parallels could use a little work on their messaging. I wonder if VMWare Fusion does this?
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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