Potential serious snow leopard bug - be careful

[assagai]

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/10/11/major-bug-in-snow-leopard-deletes-all-user-data

Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple's latest Operating System. Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most data is gone, according to iTWire.

The problem, can easily be reproduced when a user logs into the 'guest' account, either on purpose or by accident, and when they log back out of the account and back into their normal one, they find that their account has been fully reset with all data wiped and lost - the account is like a brand new one. The home directory still exists under "/Users/username" but is completely empty.

Users are reporting that the data is unrecoverable and cannot be found anywhere on the hard drive, and the only way to restore it is if the user has been performing backups on a separate hard-drive. Apparently the problem has been present since a few days after launch, as the forum post dates back to 12th September, but as of yet, Apple has been silent.

It seems the only work around at this stage is to disable the Guest account, or at least disable it and then re-enabling it so that it's a native Snow Leopard account. Another suggestion is to create a new account and enforce parental controls, if you really need a temporary account.

It's not clear how many users are affected, but it seems like any user who had Leopard before the upgrade, and had the guest account enabled are affected and are at risk.

 

[d0b33]

Man... if this is true(I won't test it myself) then this would be an epic fail.

 

[PeterCH]

Thank goodness I'm still on Leopard .... and XP.

With operating systems always wait until the first service pack or update, unless you've got a spare system to mess around on.

 

[phiber]

With operating systems always wait until the first service pack or update, unless you've got a spare system to mess around on.

First update came for snow leopard, rumours are the 2nd is on its way....

This is a terrible bug, glad i dont let anyone go near my mac book though

 

[PeterCH]

First update came for snow leopard, rumours are the 2nd is on its way....

This is a terrible bug, glad i dont let anyone go near my mac book though

I didn't know that. Ok, so it's advisable to wait a bit longer than.

 

[Ou grote]

fsck! Hope my maid doesn't use my imac. Bitch ate my left over pizza,wondering what's next.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

This does not sound good... hope it get fixed promptly.

 

[Antybubbs]

Has anyone had this happen to them with Snow leopard?

 

[Sputnik]

No problems here. My guest account is deactivated and will stay that way regardless of bugs or not.

 

[w1z4rd]

All I can say about this is.. WOW!!!

I am using my macbook atm, so I wont be trying to test this. Epic fail from Apple if this is true... pity people cant sue software manufacturers for this kinda terrible software engineering.

 

[PeterCH]

All I can say about this is.. WOW!!!

I am using my macbook atm, so I wont be trying to test this. Epic fail from Apple if this is true... pity people cant sue software manufacturers for this kinda terrible software engineering.

Tell me about it. Windows completely wiped a 16GB NTFS USB stick of mine just last week. Write behind caching was disabled, I must have powered down the machine or put it in sleep mode then when it awoke the stick was not accessible and the only way to get it working was to run chkdsk /f and that resulted in most files being lost anyway - just some lost clusters reclaimed.

 

[Keeper]

ouch!

 

[d0b33]

Looks like I'm safe... I did a clean install, this only affects users who upgraded from leopard.

So the old "Always do fresh install" is true for OSX as well

 

[PeterCH]

Looks like I'm safe... I did a clean install, this only affects users who upgraded from leopard.

So the old "Always do fresh install" is true for OSX as well

It's a crazy addage. After all I did Tiger to Leopard, ME to XP, never had issues.

It takes a lot of time to reinstall everything, your apps, your plugins, your settings, get those crazy serial numbers etc etc. Upgrading is the only way for some of us without having us pull all our hair out.

 

[mjkelly]

It's a crazy addage. After all I did Tiger to Leopard, ME to XP, never had issues.

It takes a lot of time to reinstall everything, your apps, your plugins, your settings, get those crazy serial numbers etc etc. Upgrading is the only way for some of us without having us pull all our hair out.

I did leopard to snow leopard and had endless problems with bugs, eventually had to do clean install, and it was worth it! Took me a few hours though to re-install everything....

 

[FreeMan]

I've been on SL for almost a month now...no issues, Vodacom 3g usb working fine...OS faster than ever!

 

[w1z4rd]

Tell me about it. Windows completely wiped a 16GB NTFS USB stick of mine just last week. Write behind caching was disabled, I must have powered down the machine or put it in sleep mode then when it awoke the stick was not accessible and the only way to get it working was to run chkdsk /f and that resulted in most files being lost anyway - just some lost clusters reclaimed.

Never lost data like that except if the disk is faulty on a flash disk. Mind you I tend to use Linux, but even in Windows never had that happen to me unless there was a hardware problem.

Still to lose all your data if someone logs in as guest is an epic fail. I hope this bad code bug in OSX is fixed quickly. Im too scared to test it on my macbook.

 

[bwana]

Never lost data like that except if the disk is faulty on a flash disk. Mind you I tend to use Linux, but even in Windows never had that happen to me unless there was a hardware problem.

Still to lose all your data if someone logs in as guest is an epic fail. I hope this bad code bug in OSX is fixed quickly. Im too scared to test it on my macbook.

You should have a backup regiment in place regardless of your OS - not to have one is an epic user fail.

Seems to be the solution is pretty easy - disable guest account . . . reenable guest account.

 

[w1z4rd]

You should have a backup regiment in place regardless of your OS - not to have one is an epic user fail.

Seems to be the solution is pretty easy - disable guest account . . . reenable guest account.

Thats not a real solution, lol. Thats a work around. A real solution is when they actually fix the bad code.

One thing I know about users and backups... is very very very few actually do them.

Just so I get this right... disabling then reenabling the guest account fixes this large flaw?

 

[bwana]

Thats not a real solution, lol. Thats a work around. A real solution is when they actually fix the bad code.

True . . . but did you notice how I managed to work the work 'epic' in there?

One thing I know about users and backups... is very very very few actually do them.

Now that you're a mac user there's little excuse not to take advantage of the built in time machine app or download superduper if you want something a bit more configurable.

Just so I get this right... disabling then reenabling the guest account fixes this large flaw?

It's supposed to but much like I don't test to see if the power has been restored by sticking a screwdriver into a socket I havent tried to destroy my data. The best backups are the ones you never need.