Accountancy software company Intuit has created a waiting list for users affected by a flawed update to its QuickBooks Pro application.

The update erased QuickBooks data from the hard drives of many users last weekend, Intuit acknowledged. It affected the Mac OS X QuickBooks software, versions 2006 and 2007.

Users reported that applying the automatic updater sometimes deleted their Desktop folders, which could result in the loss of gigabytes of data. The data loss occurred after the updater displayed various fallacious error messages, such as warnings about there being insufficient disk space or a lack of network connection, according to several posts Dec. 15 and 16 on Intuit and Apple support forums.

“A percentage of user files had been shoved into the Trash, while others were marked as deleted when they shouldn’t have been,” said Drew Janssen, owner of DriveRescue, a Baltimore-area data recovery service. “It’s worse than we first thought.

The phone’s been ringing pretty steadily since Monday morning, from all over the country. Something in the updater process in the QuickBooks update was deleting the Desktop and some other files.”

The main reason for this problem seems to be the working process of the OS X which does not place the deleted files in the Trash. This might have caused some users to put the files back in their respective folders. So, these files are invisible to the user and the computer is signaled that these files are available for overwriting.

The company suggests that the users who are affected by this bug should stop all the work. Also, the QuickBooks updater requires users to type in the administrative password for the computer.

Although this is one of the strengths of QuickBooks in protecting the users against viruses, this acted as a drawback as the administrative password allowed the updater to do whatever it wanted to do.