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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.
Would I be a bad person if I were to suggest that this would be a perfect time to upsell Time Capsules to worried Snow Leopard customers?
"Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix."
That in itself exonerates them, in my view...Microsoft would happily deny the issue until they fixed it, then try to downplay it. At least Apple has owned up to it.
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
This is Apple! Steve Jobs can do no wrong! I spent $2100 on this machine! Windows sucks... Omg omg omg!!11!!!!1! I need justification... Absolution... Microsoft sucks! I love Apple!
.. are everywhere today trying to distract from the Danger episode!
to all early adopters for beta testing Snow Leopard for me.
...the average user is not very likely to get hit by it, fortunately. Hopefully they'll have a fix out quickly nonetheless.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
~Philly
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Ha! That's what you get for using OSX people.
This is the bigger part of this story.
In the Mac community, guests are expected to clean up after fucking you in the ass.
So I've come to accept that maybe Macs can get viruses. Possibly.
But see it doesn't matter because Macs don't NEED viruses! So there!
Mac OS stole naming convention from Ubuntu.
Gay Cheetah
Gay Puma
Gay Jaguar
Gay Panther
Gay Tiger
Gay Leopard
Gay Snow leopard
Ok so maybe it's not that similar after all.
How does something like this make it out of the door? Is this happening on machines that have been upgraded, on fresh installs, or across all platforms. It seems like someone somewhere in the R&D and beta phases should have come across this a lot sooner.
from the article
"Snow Leopard has been plagued with bugs since its release, including problems with the Finder hanging or crashing, incompatibility with certain apps, and the AirPort connection dropping"
wonder how many 100s of posts flaming MS we would get if this was a vista article.
and that's a fact jack
Well since the only apparent critics are anon cowards I'll just assume that they are all MS fan boys out to get their cockroach bites while the getting is good. I've never used the guest account and I always disable it so this is likely not a problem for me. Also I wonder if the "more than a month old complaints" are actually in the developer forums because the retail version won't pass a month until later this month.
Why bother
...it's incredibly rare that it strikes, and it has a relatively high threshold of pre-requisites that need to be true before it even has this very low chance of happening at all.
John C. Randolph, I hear that you no longer work for Apple, but I think that you can deliver us some badly-needed facts.
John, why has Snow Leopard been plagued with so many bugs? We didn't see this with earlier releases of Mac OS X. What has changed to make the recent release so buggy? And these aren't minor issues, either. This bug in particular is quite serious.
... and I'm, uhh... who are you again?
I can see the fnords!
I know there are many data recovery options you can use with Windows drives... but as a Windows user, could someone tell me if theres anything for Macs?
Does it also delete the smug?
I'm in the process of recovering all my data after I had both the drive I was working with and my backup disk go at once.
I was playing with my primary drive, maybe a little rough, but I figured my time machine backup was solid and I had just updated it before delving into this project.
Long story short, the time machine backup was erased because the volume was picked up by another OS X installation and when asked if I wanted to use it for Time machine I said no. Then I went to use the backup and it was gone.
Right now I'm running r-studio to try to recover the data.
Anyone know any other HFS+ undelete tools?
by default, so you have to go out of your way to enable it. I would not do it, if really wanted to allow someone limited local access to the machine, I would create a limited account for that purpose alone.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
to be a PC. :)
Life without walls.
Hi, I'm a PC and ready for Windows 7
And I'm a Ma... what were we talking about?
Because their marketing department runs the rest of the company.
They did say that Snow Leopard frees up an extra 7GB for you...
Unix, Linux, Mac, even Windows lovers all agree that the biggest security hole in any operating system is the USER! Delete the worthless user, and the system will be much more secure! Mac needs to capitalize on this feature.
"Your users are compromising your security? Can't get a handle on all those backdoors? Now, you can delete the user, AND his data! Upgrade to OSX 10.666 now."
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If one thing has been burned into my brain as a programmer, it's this:
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
The data is sacred. The data is life.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We can't get a virus or trojans or....hey, where did my data go?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
True, but I can imagine how this happened. The guest user account is designed to erase itself after you log out. So there must have been some screw up to where the "erase user after log out" code got applied to the real user instead of to a guest user. It's a real shame that this wasn't caught in testing before it could burn an end user, but I can see how a bug like this could slip through the cracks.
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
Except that if you are going to guarantee that you'll never corrupt or delete the user's data, then you have to guarantee that your program's behavior is well-defined. And usually programs that crash are crashing because they contain errors that lead to undefined behavior.
So if you want to be sure not to corrupt anything, you pretty much aren't allowed to crash either. (note: even if your program never writes to the disk, if it's buggy it might be vulnerable to a code injection attack that would cause it to write to the disk...)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
How do you measure the value of data? You can't assign $/KB of data, as one couldn't equate a 20MB Stephen King unpublished manuscript to be equivalent to 4 hi-res pictures of my wife's flower garden. However, I'm not a fan or Stephen King, but my wife loves her flower garden.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
"Not guaranteed to maintain data integrity, always back up your data. Use at your own risk."
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Yes, if there is one thing that the software industry has taught me, it is that the QA teams take their jobs personally...
I imagine now would be a really great time to start advertising OS X UnDelete! Recover Deleted Files! Great opportunity for either a systems tools vendor or someone pushing malware.
If their data had been in the cloud this wouldn't have ... oh damn never mind.
That's how it frees 7 GB of disk space
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Besides that, you didnt really want all that data anyways.
You will be much happier without it.
And all you people who didnt back up, its your fault, you hear me?
You get this great software for free and you expect it to be bug free.
Disclaimer: I am Apple user and have been since my Apple IIe in 1984. I began using Macs in 1991 and have a lot of experience with them. In other words, I'm not your average user and I'm extra careful with my data and my setup. I create a bootable backup before upgrading, etc.
When I upgrade to Snow Leopard I installed Rosetta because some of the software I depend upon cannot be run without it. While using this piece of amazing and somewhat buggy software my screen went blue and I was "spontaneously logged out." I encounter this problem only in the buggy software but I am not the only one experiencing such problems. Apparently there are scores if not hundreds (thousands?) of users affected by this "spontaneous log out." No amount of backing up is going to completely protect you if your computer goes tits up for no discernible reason at all.
I love me some Apple products but I also recognize some of those products have serious QA issues which are not only unaddressed but Apple has not even acknowledged them. Such bugs are not the fault of "extraordinary" users even if we can understand how a very esoteric and hard-to-replicate bugs may not show up in the testing phase.
blog
I feel compelled to correct your signature:
I believe it's "for all intents and purposes", which would make more sense too.
People were talking about how much hard drive space you could free up after installing Snow Leopard. Well, it's even better! It continues to free up space long after being installed!
Snow Leopard, never again run out of space (TM)
Agreed!
T-Mobile Sidekick user data got deleted as well.
I cannot stress this enough, back up your user data often. Even back up data on your mobile devices and cell phones for they can be deleted as well. Even bugs in Mac OSX can delete user data, and even on a Mac it can have a hard drive failure and wipe out your data. Backing up user data should be a part of everyone's daily if not at least weekly routines.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
They move on pretty quickly after apologising. Well, okay, they don't actually do the apologising themselves. That's left to the fanboys. And nothing was learned.
...and I'm Mac OSX. As you know, Mac OSX is the most stable, safe OS around, isn't that right, Mac Data?
Yes!. All I want to say is LNJHBKJQ*&*&O$_!#HNKJDLW
Of course you can't make the entire program crash proof, but you can pay particular attention to the parts that might lead to data being deleted, making them the number-1 priority.
Yes, any bug could lead to deleted or corrupted data; but most don't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OSX 10.14.2 (Fat Cat)
OSX 10.14.23 (Heathcliff)
OSX 10.14.4 (Garfield)
Steve Jobs clearly intended for this to happen, as it's called iClean and is a service whereby the clutter of the Administrative account is eliminated. You do not need any functionality or data beyond which Apple already supplies, so in an effort to keep your computer healthy iClean will auto-scrub your account.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Whoooosh.
Oh, and you must be new around here.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
GP also misuses the phrase "begs the question".
They are either a complete and utter fuckwit, or making an ironic statement.
whoa there cowboy.
Maybe I'm completely mistaken, but unless you're still using fat, a program should never be able to corrupt your filesystem such that it's not recoverable. Even more, in Windows since Vista, no program will crash the computer -- driver errors yes, but userland programs? nope. Now, I've seen many a mac crash from buggy software over the past while, but no Windows program. And if they do, corruption cannot happen, because the filesystem should be recoverable -- be it mac, linux or windowz.
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Apparently this team was not the regular Apple programmers, Apple invited that team as guests to write the guest user code for them. Unfortunately all the source got deleted after the guests left, that is why they have such had time in reproducing the bug and fixing it.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
1) USB flash drives use FAT16 or FAT32 not a Mac OS X filesystem. They are implemented as filesystem plug-ins. USB drives ARE slow; especially when on a slow USB BUS. Me, I have whole USB bus for a time machine SATA drive and it runs as fast as one can expect from that configuration- no complaints.
2) Encrypted "volumes" are disk images; handled in userspace I believe... they are slower; but then they are software encrypted... I get good performance from not using sparse images; the sparse ones are slower (sparse images split the disk into 8MB files for easy resizing.) Sparse files have hash overhead fetching image files, open/closing overhead for those files, HFS+ auto-defragging, the 8MB segments is likely not optimally allocated (linear,) and I think it is quite likely the disk cache working twice.
3) WebDAV generally sucks (iDisk) and I never was a fan of it. still prefer FTP. FTP and WebDAV are both filesystem plug-ins which causes more trouble than they are worth-- not to mention loads a ton of code into the kernel; risking stability and security. Userspace would make MUCH MORE SENSE; especially since the network is the bottleneck not the userspace.
4) HFS+ is a fine filesystem. Sure it is old and based on decades old HFS. It works quite well and is stable. It is simple and highly flexible with easy hacks for adding new features. Its biggest problem is the wasted space for small files; but 10.6 fixes that with a hidden database (everything in HFS is a file, including internal structures.) It can be better; but it is not bad simply because it is old and feature laden.
--
Lets petition Apple to include FuseFS officially in the OS! (then they can move FTP and WebDAV out there and add HTTP, SSH...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where do you think they got the panties?
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
MS's next action should be to compile a version of Windows that works on the Mac platform, then market it as Windows Data Protection Edition.
har har. yeah yeah yeah. It's late.
So this is how they were able to save 6GB on every upgrade. Nice!
Ever since I got MacOS 10.6 "Slow Leopard" my OSX experience with Safari has SUCKED.
Every so often Safari freezes up the whole system for up to half a minute
Check this syslog:
Oct 12 16:57:51 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:22.553759, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
Oct 12 17:10:35 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:6.630163, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
Oct 12 17:16:29 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: Periodic CFURLCache Insert stats (iters: 369) - Tx time:0.003914, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO, Size of cache-file: 167206912, Num of Failures: 2
Oct 12 17:40:45 un2803-09 Safari[18145]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:16.382989, # of Inserts: 1, # of bytes written: 5, Did shrink: NO
People have been complaining about that for more than a month now. Hey I just supported your asses by getting .. and come to think of it I have gotten applecare protection plans for everything
a $2800 Macbook Pro and I _paid_ for the 10.6 upgrade for my old MBP, what do I need to do to get this fixed,
do I have to buy a time machine or get a MobileMe subscription (WTF should I pay to sync to my ipod touch? Oh did
I mention I got a 16Gb ipod touch a while ago too!)
I bought from you guys, that's a whooping $350 bucks for a macbook, and it's also those little things that count
like you making me shell out an extra $29 for a display adaptor because you chose to go with some weird-ass standard
nobody has heard of before...
You OWE me to fix this bug, buddy.
Hello Kitty!
I wonder how the guy at Roughlydrafted will explain that this is an excellent new feature of OS X what you cannot find in Vista.
Wait I just saw that he already has an exclusive report !
Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft’s Windows Phone
Err, never mind....
Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is)
There isn't one that comes with the OS. (Perhaps somebody other than Apple has done a tmpfs port or from-scratch implementation.)
I think this sort of disaster shows that one simply can't trust desktop computing. You should put your data in the cloud instead, where knowledgeable and careful companies like Microsoft take care of the backups for you!
You mean Tron had it right??
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Guest account should ALWAYS be disabled on your Mac and as a matter of fact on ANY OS. It's a matter of security. The easiest way to hack a system is with a guest account.
This is a serious regression in /. community: nobody yet quoted BOFH...
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Well...it just works assuming you don't want to use the built in functionality.
Told.
make a new plan, Stan
I'm waiting for OSX 10.14 ("Common Housecat").
Not me, I'm holding out for OS X 10.15 "Snow Common Housecat".
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"I just want a stable operating system without bugs or hassles! "
They kind of look like assholes now, considering the current situation.
Perhaps we should divert the funds from bashing MS to QA hey boys?
Karma's a bitch...
I did this for quite a while, but my machine is a laptop. When I was using it, I had to choose between 1) being tethered to the external drive or 2) not having Time Machine backing up. If I chose 2), then when I was done with the machine instead of closing the lid and letting it sleep, I had to leave it run so a TM backup could get done. This got old fast, and I bought a Time Capsule.
Your solution is great for a desktop machine. For a laptop... not so much.
<pedant>
The data are sacred. The data are life. "Data" is plural for "datum".
</pedant>
Free Martian Whores!
hi I'm a mac, and I'm a pc.
Hi there pc, what do u have there? *looks towards some guy in a suit with a folder with papers *
some files... and you?
*guy shredding papers* uhm what?
The BBC is also reporting it here.
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tmp content disappears after reboot and this behavior is editable
so Guest login after Guest login without reboot would recover previous Guest data
not a perfect solution either
All you have to do stick umount /path/to/guest/home/dir in the logout script. It automatically disappears in the event of a hard reboot, which is superior behavior to persisting through reboot.
The set up defines the "default" behavior in the event of unexpected trouble. If everything is working correctly, your logout scripts run fine and it doesn't matter how you set it up.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!