Major Snow Leopard Bug Said To Delete User Data

inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.

Comments

Re:Oh.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

For a while, at any rate, dell was bundling a year or two of some online backup service with their systems, I don't remember which one, nor could I find any reference to it on their site just now.

What surprises me is that MS hasn't done much in the area(unless you are willing to go all the way to Windows Home Server). Architecturally, Volume Shadow Copy is abundantly powerful and has been available since before Time Machine even hit the scene; but you certainly wouldn't know about it from looking at any of the advertising, documentation, or spec sheets for non-server Microsoft OSes.

Re:Oh.

[reSonans]

I know you're kidding, but Time Capsule has been upsold in the past for a similar reason.

Remember Backup.app from the .Mac suite? It was touted as a complete remote backup solution for a couple of years, until Apple changed their tune in Knowledge Base articles and began describing it as a modest service intended for browser bookmarks and user settings. The reason? Restoring files was prone to data loss.

Time Capsule + Time Machine appeared shortly thereafter, and Apple made a big, intentional splash about how this particular hardware and software combination will keep your data safe.

Re:Oh man. Nightmare.

[zippthorne]

Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is) for the guest account. Then they don't have to delete anything, it disappears automatically.

I used to use tmpfs for guest accounts on my ubuntu box for just that reason. That along with encrypted swap files with random keys generated on loading makes "deleting guest data" irrelevant (and lets you resize the temporary device on the fly arbitrarily high by adding more swap if you realize you're going to exceed your available physical ram or allotted space)

You can populate the guest dir from a new-user template, or use unionfs type dealies.

What I did was probably all wrong, but my point remains that you shouldn't have to delete stuff when you're done with the guest account. At the most, you should only have to forget a temporary encryption key, which ought to happen automagically in the event of a hard reboot.