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Data Loss Bug In OS X 10.5 Leopard

Posted by kdawson on from the first-do-no-harm dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Leopard's Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in progress. This author first came across it when Samba crashed while he was moving a directory from his desktop over to a Samba mount on his FreeBSD server."

34 of 603 comments (clear)

  1. That's silly. by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny

    Normally while moving you ensure the copy completed before deleting the original. Apple must be using some discount programmers.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:That's silly. by nmb3000 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Apple must be using some discount programmers

      Of course not! Don't be a troll.

      Everyone knows that Apple's products Just Work, and that's no different in this case. The files were moved just like you asked, and if you can't find them. well, that's not Apple's fault, is it? You don't blame the contractor who built you home when you lose your keys, do you?

      In any case, you should be using Shadow Copy...er...Time Machine which would have protected you from going and losing track of your own files.

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    2. Re:That's silly. by Eq+7-2521 · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, it's probably just that the automated Schnapps IV system that they have for maintaining the Ballmer Peak went awry one day. (Read the tooltip if you haven't seen this before.)

      --
      At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
    3. Re:That's silly. by networkBoy · · Score: 2, Funny

      And if you need to move the files to a different volume, just use symbolic links instead of the hard links!
      Oh, wait... That's right up there with what my brother did.
      I jokingly told him to sudo rm -r -f /
      he tried it...

      I'll have to tell him to do the softlinks / delete the hardlinks as a way to um... shadow his files :-)
      -nB
      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    4. Re:That's silly. by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 4, Funny

      Isn't this a Mac? I thought they were supposed to be easy to use.

    5. Re:That's silly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Reeducate the user, you say. Surely you must be joking, right?

      I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley.

    6. Re:That's silly. by delire · · Score: 4, Funny

      resource fork... from Apple's rsync manpage: -E --extended-attributes copy extended attributes, resource forks
      With cryptic commands just to copy files Apple will ALWAYS have ~.001% market share. When will Apple get it into their head that programmers shouldn't design user interfaces?

      Why doesn't Apple just copy the way Ubuntu does it and get with the 2000's?

      Pride is what it is. That damned pride!
  2. A great disturbance in the Apple by syylk · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...As if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

    1. Re:A great disturbance in the Apple by kerohazel · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but if their data is stricken down, it will become more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

      --
      Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
    2. Re:A great disturbance in the Apple by ILuvRamen · · Score: 3, Funny

      In memory of them, I'm officially nicknaming Leopard: Vistapard.

      --
      Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
    3. Re:A great disturbance in the Apple by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 4, Funny

      In memory of them, I'm officially nicknaming Leopard: Vistapard.

      "Vistard"

    4. Re:A great disturbance in the Apple by wildsurf · · Score: 2, Funny

      In memory of them, I'm officially nicknaming Leopard: Vistapard.

      Leoptard.

      --
      Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
    5. Re:A great disturbance in the Apple by e4g4 · · Score: 2, Funny

      How about just "Leotard" :P

      --
      The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
  3. Wait... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's kind of strange that this didn't come up while people were beta testing OS X 10.5. Samba is used in many places. I hope they get it fixed soon.

    Exactly which decade did you fall into your recently awkened from coma in? Testing? Testing? Nobody tests anything anymore, they just go play with all the new toys and stare at the eye-candy. Actual mundane, humdrum testing? That's an SEP if ever I didn't see one.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  4. Re:Wierd by cnettel · · Score: 4, Funny

    All fanboys were just happy with how blazing fast file copy was compared to Vista. The non-fanboys tried to check the real size of the dir by copying it to a Vista machine afterwards, but the progress bar got stuck on 413 hours left and counting, so they couldn't file the bug in time.

  5. You just don't get it... by juanfgs · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the new Leopard "iLostMyFrigginFiles" feature, next version they will add a badass black hole effect when it does that!

    1. Re:You just don't get it... by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh great! Soon, Windows users will experience "white holes" where Mac files magically appear in the My Documents folder.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  6. Take advantage of Time Machine by tji · · Score: 3, Funny


    Not to be glib, but.. This would be a great demonstration of the value of "Time Machine" backups. Time Machine is not perfect, but it is a good start on a backup system well integrated into the OS. The example problem, data loss, would be really easily recovered via Time Machine.

    Beyond the basics that every decent backup app does, the things I like about Time Machine are:

    - Integration into Applications. For example: "Show me what my iTunes library or iPhoto library looked like last Thursday"

    - Integration into OS install. In the case of disk failure, recovery to previous state is simple - rather than multi-step with a separate backup app.

    Some things that need improving:

    - Better handling of file exceptions. I keep work data in encrypted disk volumes (DMGs). If I change one byte, the whole huge file needs to be backed up as each change is detected (generating MANY copies of that big DMG). The only other choice is to say "ignore this file/directory". Same thing applies to any large file, such as a VMware VM file. A better option would be to say "Back this file up, but only keep 'n' versions".

    - Time Machine has gotten twice, pegging the CPU/fans on my MacBook Pro.

  7. Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by eniac42 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Advert on Amazon Mechanical Turk:
    Write OS-X compatible application to Move a file between two filesystem devices..
    Time Allotted:: 6 hours. Reward: $10.00..

    --
    "A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
    1. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by Larry+Lightbulb · · Score: 4, Funny

      rm $from Now where is my $5?

    2. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by megaditto · · Score: 2, Funny
      Don't you mean

      cp $from $to || rm -r $from ?
      --
      Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
    3. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by megaditto · · Score: 5, Funny

      And that's probably why you don't work for Apple!

      --
      Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
    4. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by fractoid · · Score: 2, Funny

      All about branding hey?
      alias iMove mv

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    5. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 2, Funny

      Which operating system uses the trash bin to burn discs?

    6. Re:Ah, the "outsourcing" coding model.. by CaptnMArk · · Score: 2, Funny

      For the paranoid, check if $to is a subdirectory of $from.

      If you're lucky, it will take forever and then delete all your data.

  8. Re:Par for the course? by mctk · · Score: 4, Funny

    or a Linux environment ripped-off from Linux

    Forking Linux developers!

    --
    Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
  9. Re:I don't understand by myowntrueself · · Score: 4, Funny

    I agree. I always copy then delete, especially when dealing with network shares.

    Despite its many shortcomings, Windows ME (*NOT* the more recent ME2) had this truly wonderful feature where if you delete something from a network share it would *copy* the data across the network into your trash folder.

    Really handy when you delete 10G of data on a network share and your local hard drive has 5G available and you are on a 10mbps network.

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  10. AFAIK, this has always been an issue with Macs by toadlife · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hunter Kressel has been warning people about this for years now.

    --
    I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
  11. Re:defectivebydesign by klubar · · Score: 4, Funny

    You have to word the dialog box more precisely. "Do you wish to not allow data corruption or success on loss of destination meda?" Cancel? Retry? Abort? Ok?

  12. Re:Problems by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Funny
    No need to mod you down. You're just wrong.

    simon% dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1m count=17
    17+0 records in
    17+0 records out
    17825792 bytes transferred in 0.297437 secs (59931329 bytes/sec)
     
    simon% ls -l test
    -rw-r--r-- 1 simon 501 17825792 Nov 5 18:32 test
     
    simon% /usr/bin/time cp test ~/Desktop
            0.44 real 0.00 user 0.03 sys
     
    simon% ls -l ~/Desktop/test
    -rw-r--r-- 1 simon 501 17825792 Nov 5 18:33 /Volumes/Users/Users/simon/Desktop/test
     
      simon% uname -a
    Darwin mac 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
    ... I suspect you have a hardware problem if it's really taking that long to copy files. The above 0.44 secs (wall-clock time) is on a standard internal SATA disk. No RAID or anything special.

    Simon.
    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  13. Temporal problem by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Funny

    In any case, you should be using Shadow Copy...er...Time Machine which would have protected you from going and losing track of your own files.

    Great! So now not only don't we know where our data is but when it is. Perhaps in a week or two's time the data will materialize in the folder it was supposed to be moved to with an accompanying "whorping" sound coming from the speakers?

  14. Re:Tiger has this problem as well!!! by IceCreamGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Dude, Mac users are just getting this kind of functionality? Come on, we've had that feature in Windows for years...

  15. Abble? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I think there might pe a broplem with your keypoarq.

  16. Woosh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Woosh