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Data Loss Bug In OS X 10.5 Leopard
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."
Just wanted to also confirm that the bug was in Tiger. I was backing up music files to do a clean format for Leopard and lost everything when the hard drive got disconnected by mistake.
Another thought springs to mind... is this even that critical? Doesn't leopard have the time machine in it? Can't you just go back and get your files out of the time machine if they were that important?
I haven't "upgraded" yet so I don't actually know much about this Time Machine thing and how it works.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Unbelieveable. Forgot to check the result of the copy operation eh? So basically this is a catastropic defect for people who deal with very large media files to and from remote stores or people who deal with virtual machine images.
Back in the day when I used to use my mac I dropped a directory (A) into another directory (B) but there was an existing directory (C) with the same name as (A). The finder asked me something, I clicked OK. I was dismayed to find that the dialog had asked me "Would you like to replace directory C, with A?" - Why on earth would that ever be the default option for a directory move? From the users perspective you aren't really moving the directory, the intention is to move the files, thus the sane response would be to merge A with C not replace it.
Whatever.
I've had that also (on Jaguar, IIRC) when an external drive lost power. Lost both the data and the old backup, simultaneously.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
That's left over from the original spatial Finder design in Mac Classic. Apple hasn't really decided whether they want to get rid of the spatial interface, so instead they've made this horrible frankenstein half-spatial, half-browser interface which pretty much everybody hates.
Doing a "replace" for that operation makes sense in a spatial system because all spatial icons are treated the same way. You'd wouldn't expect dragging a Word file named "happy.doc" into a folder already containing a "happy.doc" to perform a merge operation; so why would you expect that with a folder in the same situation?
That said, if you've never used Mac Classic, you'd think OS X has nothing but a browser interface, in which case all metaphors and ideals are out the damned window, and the OS might as well do a merge operation. Since you most likely came from Windows, or a Linux environment ripped-off from Linux, you'd expect dragging identically-named folders together to do a merge operation because that's what you're used to.
Apple needs to make up its mind what Finder is. It gets worse and worse every version.
Comment of the year
Why is every destructive computer bug that happens tagged with "haha"?
Data Loss Bug In OS X 10.5 Leopard
bug, macosx, apple, haha
Symantec Updates Cause Chaos in China
haha, security, bug, windows, feature
Banner Ad on Myspace Serves Adware to 1 Million
haha, myspace, pwnd, security, adware
Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive
linux, haha, storage, bug, spam
Islamists exploit buffer overflow, hack U.S. nuclear command; world doomed
eschaton, religion, waronterror, haha
OK, I made one of those up. But it doesn't even matter what OS or company is responsible for the problem - whoever makes the tags seems to take great delight in all computer snafus. How does the tagging system work anyway? It's always been mysterious to me.
Grr! Arg!
So your irreplaceable videos were made the previous year and you had no backup.
I suppose the PC makers should like you. You'll shoot up a PC and have to buy a new one every couple years. And each maker will get a piece of the action, since you'll blame the previous maker for routine data loss.
Or you could just do what everyone in the computer business has been telling you to do for at least 30 years and... make a backup.
I call bullshit on Windows and Linux, and I'm pretty sure you're wrong even for DOS.
Maybe move should be implemented as copy, completly then delete but its often not.
Why on earth wouldn't you? Doing it any other way is not only obviously dangerous, it's far harder to implement! What would you do, map the file on disk, unlink the file and then copy and wipe each raw disk block? I could see doing something crazy like this in specialized applications, where freeing storage at the source is priority one, but in the general case it's insane.
The Apple issue is clearly just a stupid exception handling bug.
Basically, it nukes the conflicting /alpha/baz and then performs the copy. Brain dead behavior if you ask me.
Vista works very differently, not only Folders are confirmed but every file in the folders are confirmed with options to replace/don't copy/create second copy...
So ya this sucked in older versions of Windows, but Vista does a great job of handling this, better than any other GUI file manager I have ever seen to date.
Maybe you should try Vista instead of OSX... But again if MS was doing their job and was touting features like this in Vista, people would find more reasons why Vista has a lot of things to offer. Instead MS's marketing is retarded and nice features like this are NEVER mentioned and none of even the tech press notices them or points them out to users.
And trust me when I say there are literally 1000s of features like this that make the difference between Vista and XP night and day for daily usage.
Speaking as one of those IT people, NTFS is probably one of the coolest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. ACLs, alternate data streams, directory junctions, single-instance stores, shadow copy, the list of useful features is huge. Even more surprisingly, it works pretty much as advertised. Frickin' cool.
There's another angle, though. On paper, Vista's NTFS-based backup technology walks all over Time Machine. However, the USABILITY of Vista's technology is crap. This morning, I enabled Time Machine by plugging in a USB drive and clicking "Use as Backup Disk" when prompted. To do restores, I launch the cleverly named "Time Machine" application. I've already used it twice today just because it's fun to watch the spacey animations.
Compare that to Vista's clunky "Backup and Restore Center", which you have to use if you want to backup your files on an alternate volume. I guarantee you that using "Backup and Restore Center" is beyond most average users. Sure, it might be "better", but what good is it if it never gets used?
This
Someone already mentioned that the bug is not in copy or delete functions of the kernel - it is in the Finder GUI that is not open source.