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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?
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
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
As far as I can tell, from reading this on other sites, the reproduction involves:
* Machine that was upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard
* Already had the Guest account enabled on Leopard.
* Logs into Guest account (not a remote login but a local, physical login)
* Is hard-booted (after crash, power failure, or power button) from Guest account back into Admin account.
Despite a combination of these steps, people are finding it hard to reproduce. So it's the sort of issue that could fall through the QA cracks.
... and I'm, uhh... who are you again?
I can see the fnords!
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 don't think it takes a Microsoft fan boy to be critical of a production OS bug that results in complete data loss.
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.
I'm not a fanboi of any particular OS and use all the major ones at home (Win7, Macbook Pro, Ubuntu, Debian, BSD, etc.). They're just tools and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.
But this is a serious bug, and based on the past I'm certain there would be many posts from smug Apple fanbois if it had been a Windows bug. I don't use my Guest account either, but that doesn't mean it would have sucked major ass if I had lost all my data because I did. The user could not possibly predict that just using the Guest account would incur this kind of risk.
It doesn't make sense to be an apologist. I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
It's explicitly noted that it doesn't happen every time. It's very likely they did test it, and just missed it. It's not necessarily an excuse, but bugs do happen, and this has not been reported during the beta – meaning it's either exceptionally rare or a very recent bug. I'd bet on the former.
On a different note, the CNET article takes a very sensationalist approach with using the phrase "plagued with bugs". There's a few bugs, reported by a vocal minority of users (one of which they list – incompatibilities – isn't really a bug, just a consequence of being a new OS version with new features, changed features, and a few removed features*). I've been using Snow Leopard for the past month-and-a-half, and have experienced only a tiny handful of non-damaging crashes. One kernel panic, about three or four Safari crashes. It's around the average number of problems I've experienced on most OS/version combinations.
* One such removal is a relatively undocumented 'hack' called "InputManagers" which loads code into every Cocoa application that starts up. These no longer work in 64-bit applications, and such plugin functionality has to be re-implemented using either an application-specific plugin format (where available) or as a mach_inject background process.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them..
Never underestimate the power of shiny.
Leopard and Snow leopard are like Metallica's Load and Re-load: you know it's gonna suck when they start running out of names. I wouldn't be surprised if they named 10.7 "Def Leopard".
They did say that Snow Leopard frees up an extra 7GB for you...
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
I'm sorry, but there's no way this should've fallen through QA cracks, because it should not have made it to QA in the first place. This kind of thing should never have been possible in the first place due to a clear segregation of permissions between "Admin" and everything else - particularly "guest".
The fact that this is even possible suggests a much deeper flaw in the security mechanisms of OS X.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm waiting for OSX 10.14 ("Common Housecat").
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.
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."
If their data had been in the cloud this wouldn't have ... oh damn never mind.
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?!
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
Since it has a greater market share than Linux. (It does. Really.)
Well it is probably the 'login' or some other high privilege process that is doing the Guest account erasing after the Guest user logs off. The login process would have permissions to the Admin user data.
It probably wouldn't be left to a process running as Guest to erase the account.
I.O.U One Sig.
As I linked to another person in this thread, PhotoRec works fine on OS X as long as you aren't deathly afraid of the command line (and have a spare drive for writing out all the files it finds to).
Sure, it's a bit messy with the files (as are most undelete programs – though PhotoRec doesn't even make a cursory attempt, beyond file names), but it's pretty good at getting everything not-written-over in my experience.
I'm sorry, but there's no way this should've fallen through QA cracks, because it should not have made it to QA in the first place....
So your solution to software quality problems is "don't make mistakes in the first place."? Have you ever released a production-level application before?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
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!
Fanboys aside, Apple certainly isn't getting a pass from users that are being affected or the general "community" at large. Lots of them are pissed. There just aren't very many of them that got affected as far as I can tell. Fanboys, on the other hand, are fanboys, and I'm not sure if you can say one group of fanboys is more annoying than another. As one using Linux predominately, Linux fanboys annoy me more than any other, but obviously it's a highly subjective matter.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I don't see any evidence of apologism or Apple getting a free pass. Whenever Apple screws up, they're instantly on the front page of Slashdot, Digg, etc.
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...)
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