CheckBook and CheckBook Pro 2.6.21 now available

If you’re on macOS 11.5 or later and have a CheckBook document on a thumb drive or an external drive that hasn’t been reformatted for APFS or Mac OS Extended, this is the update for you. You might’ve read our chronicle of a major data loss issue between macOS 11.5 and FAT volumes, the short of which is NSFileManager and copyfile(), used by literally almost every application when touching a filesystem on your Mac, can no longer copy files directly to FAT volumes with any guarantee of success, leaving completely empty files in their wake. Since thumb drives and external drives almost always come factory-formatted for FAT or ExFAT, and the Mac’s basic support of these filesystems doesn’t disable write access or even warn users of the risks, perhaps because this recent development isn’t by design and Apple hasn’t read the lengthy bug report we’ve filed, more than a few of our users have experienced the joy of restoring a backup. This doesn’t just affect CheckBook, though. Just about any application that tries to copy or move a file to a FAT volume, rather than creating a new file and writing into it, could see that operation fail. We’ve witnessed the issue wipe data when you use the Move To… feature in Apple’s Preview and at least a couple of other applications from another major developer, and that was in the limited time we had for testing before we knuckled down to work around the glitch. 2.6.21 abandons these APIs on macOS 11.5 or later when the destination isn’t an APFS or Mac OS Extended volume or is shared over something besides SMB or AFP, creating brand new files from scratch instead of the more streamlined methods of copying or moving. Even with this workaround, our strong recommendation is to reformat your FAT volumes and make sure you’re sharing network volumes over SMB or AFP as soon as possible. This release has a few other tweaks, including a fix for an issue that could prevent the Accounts list from redrawing after an Account is unlocked, so you won’t want to miss it.

Learn more and update CheckBook

Learn more and update CheckBook Pro