QuickBooks Co Restore Issue: 2010-05-24
Worked on a customer’s laptop computer. Her problem: While restoring a QuickBooks 2010 company file, and overwriting the existing one on the computer with the newer one in the backup, she gets an error message saying that the file can’t be overwritten because it’s read-only attribute is set. She says that though she frequently restores backups like this, she only yesterday began experiencing this issue.
The solution we hope to discover, would be to change her computer’s configuration (whether that be in Windows 7 or in QuickBooks 2010 itself), to once-again allow these over-writes. Check the comments below for progress on this issue.
May 24th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
12:15 PM: Heading to the customer’s house to investigate and resolve this issue.
02:45 PM: Having no luck stopping the read-only-attribute-set problem at her place. We tried creating new backups and restoring from them. This did not work.
03:00 PM: So, I brought the computer experiencing the problem to my home office. I’ll work on it this evening.
06:00 PM: Read through some articles in the QuickBooks support forum. Others have experienced the same problem but no one has posted any solutions.
06:12 PM: This computer is behind on several QuickBooks updates. Applying those now.
06:30 PM: Updates installed successfully. However, the problem persists.
06:55 PM: Found that when I clear the read-only attribute on the local QBW file, then open this company file with QuickBooks, that the read-only attribute is set again whenever you either do a File–>Close Company File or do a File–>Exit out of QuickBooks. I’m hopeful that this behavior might be configurable in QuickBooks preferences somewhere. Having this attribute set is undesirable.
09:00 PM: Reviewed all QuickBooks preferences. No obvious setting to keep the data file’s read-only attribute from being set when you close it.
09:15 PM: Disabled her anti-virus software for the directory in which the QuickBooks data files reside. That did not solve the problem.
09:20 PM: Well, in order to save time, I can write a batch script that the customer can click on whenever she wishes to restore backups. This script will clear the read-only attribute on all files in the QuickBooks data directory. I’ll do this one-liner script in the morning.
May 25th, 2010 at 6:48 am
09:45 AM; Attempted to run a REPAIR of the current installation of QuickBooks Pro 2010 via the Windows 7 control panel. This failed because the installer could not find some XML manifest file, even after inserting the QuickBooks Pro 2010 installation CD. So I exited out of that installation and am now running setup directly from the QuickBooks CD.
09:51 AM: Running SETUP from the CD also gave me a REPAIR choice. So, running that now.
09:57 AM: The REPAIR went well. However, I still get the read-only file error when I attempt to restore a backup to an existing QBW file.
10:17 AM: Called QuickBooks technical support. They recommend using a different name for the QBW file each time you do a restore, in order to make falling back to an older copy possible.
I asked them about how to allow the customer to continue using the same QBW file name. The rep is checking to see if this is possible. The rep could not explain why this read-only error began happening only two days ago.
She suggested setting the QBW file permissions to give Everyone Full Control. Tried this, and the read-only attribute still gets set every time QuickBooks closes the QBW file. So, she had no further ideas, except, as discussed, to use a different name for the QBW file each time we restore it.
July 19th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Shortly after, I showed the customer how to do what the customer support folks at Intuit suggested; renaming the QuickBooks data file. She can’t afford me investigating this further. So this project is finished.