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:Hi, I'm a Mac!

[fermion]

Honestly, this bug is not surprising. if MS were marketing to a technical crowd, the file system would be what they attacked. The file system in Mac OS X does suck a lot. Copying to USB drives takes forever. Encrypted volumes, with filevault, are very fragile. Network access is often very slow. IDisk has a habit of just flaking out.

To be fair, some of these are things that MS Windows does not do natively, so it is unclear how MS would leverage this error. In any case, since MS seems to market their product on cheapness, not quality, it isn't really an issue.