

Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data - lupin_sansei
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/10/11/major-bug-in-snow-leopard-deletes-all-user-data/

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jrockway
Interesting. You really have to go out of your way to delete directories in
UNIX, so this must be some sort of intentional behavior that is misbehaving.
(It deletes your user's data, not the guest's data, right? Seems like the
opposite of what you would want to happen.)

Anyway, this is why I prefer operating systems whose source code I can view
and modify. It is nicer to find bugs by reading the source code instead of
logging into your account and finding all your data gone.

~~~
jrnkntl
Because you've read the source code of user account logins of the OS you're
running right now?

~~~
cperciva
I don't know if he has, but I've read the source code used for user logins in
the OS I'm running.

Depending on exactly where you draw the line between "code used for user
logins" and the rest of the OS, I may have fixed bugs in it, too.

~~~
mahmud
you are often the exception rather than the rule, cperciva.

~~~
jerf
Yes, but knowledge about code is very transmittable. The fact that someone
like cpercival _can_ examine the code, and has, means that I can just freeride
on his analysis, along with everybody else who has also read it. Only a
fraction of users need to verify the code for all of use to benefit. And "only
a fraction of users" for an open source project can still be a lot more users
than Microsoft can bring to bear, and a higher caliber of users, too.

Of course, Microsoft _could_ do most of the same thing if they opened their
source. People would read that too. But that's another issue, of course.

~~~
m_eiman
There's a slight problem with the "google the problem, find a patch and apply
it": if you can't read and understand the patch, you're in no better (and
probably worse) shape than you were before, security-wise.

In some ways having a late patch from a trusted source is better than a quick
one from some random place on the net. The best would be quick, trusted
patches, of course. A GPG-style web of trust validation of patches, maybe?

~~~
gmartres
Typically, the guy who found the flaw and fixed it will submit it to the
upstream developers which hopefully will be able to tell if the patch can be
trusted or not, apply it to the development repository, eventually release a
patched version, and warn vendors(mostly, Linux distributions) to upgrade. The
user only has to keep up to date.

~~~
m_eiman
Sure, but then you're back to having to wait for the vendor to supply a patch.

~~~
m_eiman
So you're (you being the who downvoted my comment) saying that you're NOT
waiting for a vendor to approve and distribute a patch if it's been propesed
by an outside developer? Please elaborate.

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ComputerGuru
I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, didn't use the Guest account under SL
until yesterday... thankfully I did not experience this bug.

~~~
dylanz
I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and my computer got slower and slower
as time went on. Opening a file in Vim started to take about 10 seconds.
Literally "everything" was slow. Had to reformat and start over. Random, but
it adds to my personal statement of "I've never had a smooth OSX upgrade, even
after 5 years".

~~~
jonny_noog
Just to give a counter point, I read about people having problems with the
Leopard => Snow Leopard upgrade so I was very cautious when it came time for
me to upgrade. I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my early 2009 Mac
Pro and have not experienced any issues yet.

I do however suspect that perhaps the reason I had such a smooth upgrade was
because my Mac Pro was quite new and my installation of Leopard at the time it
was upgraded to Snow Leopard was pretty much a pristine factory install, with
very little if any cruft hanging around.

Still these kinds of things make me happy that I keep an up to date bootable
backup of my system drive and I'll be purchasing a separate external drive to
use with Time Machine some time soon.

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jsz0
Since this story has been around for a while I'm a bit skeptical of a Windows
news site making a big deal out of it the day after the Microsoft SideKick
incident. Luckily it's a rarely used feature in OSX which is how a bug like
this can exist without much fanfare. I'm more concerned about the Finder file-
copy-no-merge issue which is dangerous design by choice; not a bug. At least
once a week I almost get burnt by it so I imagine normal users who aren't so
careful are constantly destroying data due to badly worded dialog boxes.

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CrLf
It seems to affect upgrades only, at least that's what the article implies.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer to do a clean install between major
releases of any operating system. It has lower chances of hitting some
untested or poorly tested config combination that ends up causing strange
issues.

~~~
idlewords
And after hitting this bug, doing a clean install becomes much less of a
hassle. Silver lining!

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dasil003
I'm amused by the number of commenters who are jubilously vindicated that OS X
has a nasty bug, as if that somehow makes Windows better.

~~~
briansmith
I'm not surprised. Just yesterday, everybody was Bashing Microsoft/Danger for
something very similar.

[Nitpicker's corner: Dispute "very."]

~~~
carbon8
Hence why this weeks-old news is suddenly being pushed by decidedly pro-
microsoft sites like neowin today.

~~~
Elepsis
If it's weeks-old news, doesn't that only make it worse that Apple still
hasn't bothered to fix it?

~~~
carbon8
Whether it does or not doesn't change the fact that pro-microsoft sites and,
apparently, microsoft employees are trying to deflect attention from the
sidekick incident by digging up and publicizing an obscure bug in OS X. Crying
"b..b..b..but Apple!" when faced with bad press rather than owning what
happened might make microsoft fans feel better, but at the price of further
alienating developers who see through the transparent charade.

~~~
Elepsis
While it's easy and fun to assume malice behind everything Microsoft does,
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Saying that this news (which _should_ be spread since it can lead to quite
unpleasant problems) is being promoted by Microsoft fans doesn't take away
from the severity of the bug. And the fact that this news is out _certainly_
doesn't take away from the disaster that is the Sidekick story.

Take a step back and try to avoid looking at it from a "Microsoft is a bunch
of evil jerks" perspective.

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jimbokun
More constructive questions:

How would you change Apple's development process to have caught this bug, and
bugs like it? Do any of you have processes in place for your companies that
would catch bugs of this sort?

Sure, you can always add a test for this specific bug, but catching other bugs
like it? Anyone have positive bug catching stories to tell?

~~~
ajg1977
Apple need to move away from their current approach of seeding betas/RC to
select developers and towards the open beta testing that Microsoft have
successfully embraced in recent years.

As the number of users and potential hardware/software configurations
continues to grow they cannot expect to cover a respectable percentage of
scenarios with their current closed approach to testing.

See also MobileMe Launch.

~~~
xsmasher
Scuttlebutt is that an early developer seed may be the cause of the problem -
so if more people had used that seed, this would have been caught sooner. Of
course more people would have been hit by the bug.

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petercooper
I've said this many times to many people, but I'm going to say it again. Don't
upgrade to Snow Leopard! Install it from fresh!

When I upgraded from Leopard I had a smorgasbord of bizarre problems and bugs
- with a fresh install, perfection. And I've seen the same pattern over and
over. Stop being lazy and install it from fresh - it's worth it.

~~~
telemachos
You're right and you're wrong.

In my experience, you're right to recommend a fresh installation of a
significant OSX change, rather than just an in-place upgrade.

However, Apple goes out of their way to say that you _should_ be able to
upgrade in-place. And, in general, users want to be able to upgrade in place.
It's a reasonable thing to want since it will take at least _some_ time to
reimport your data, applications, settings and so on.

So, it's a bit much to call people lazy for doing what the manufacturer
promises you can do.

~~~
petercooper
Well, yes, you're right - they say you should be able to do it. In my
experience with Leopard and Snow Leopard, however, I don't think Apple's QA is
good enough for them to be confidently recommending this course of action.

On the plus side, at least once you're set up, you can stick with it forever
and a day. Back in the Windows 98 era, you pretty much had to reinstall the
same OS fresh every year or go insane ;-)

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MaysonL
This happened to me this week, slightly differently: I took my non-booting
MacBook, on which Snow Leopard had been installed a few weeks ago, into the
local Apple store [Note: the disk problem on the MacBook was made more
critical by the fact that while investigating it, using my backup disk to boot
from, I managed to drop the backup drive about 3 feet, killing it]. I'm not
100% sure what they did: the "Genius" I was interacting with was a fast
typist. When I got home, after buying a new backup disk [3X the capacity,
~same price as the old one], the internal drive was not only unbootable, but
my user account directory was empty. Luckily DiskWarrior came through, finding
just about everything. Almost back to normal.

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jcdreads
It's Apple's attempt to convince people of the wisdom of enabling Time
Machine.

~~~
robin_reala
Flippant comment, but there’s some serious truth in this. _Data you haven’t
backed up is data you don’t want._ Time Machine makes backing up trivial to
the extent that it’s a zero button solution. I plug in my external hard drive,
it recognises it as a Time Machine backup and automatically syncs any changes
since the previous backup.

~~~
idlewords
Time Machine makes backing up trivial to the extent that you have a
sufficiently large HFS volume sitting around, and don't need to back up MySQL
databases. And if you're unlucky, it can also automate the process of losing
all your data:

[http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-
leopa...](http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/)
[http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/09/time-machine-time-
bomb.ht...](http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/09/time-machine-time-bomb.html)

~~~
glhaynes
What's the MySQL reference to? I haven't heard of a MySQL-specific issue with
Time Machine.

~~~
stilist
For me, at least, every time I reinstalled Leopard and restored with Time
Machine MySQL's data would be gone.

~~~
inklesspen
Was your MySQL installation configured to store data in any of the excluded
directories? <http://shiftedbits.org/2007/10/31/time-machine-exclusions/>

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chrischen
Great, first the cloud, now local computers. Paper can suffer water damage or
be burned. Moral of the stories: your data is never safe.

Redundant backups/distributions is the true way to go.

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chanux
I almost feel like it's "lose all user data week".

Anyway hope this kind of situations are well handled by Apple EULA.

~~~
barrkel
I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean you're hoping Apple is well
indemnified against civil action because of this flaw, I wonder why you're so
concerned for Apple Inc.'s bottom line. Are you an investor or employee of
Apple Inc.?

Some degree of liability in cases like this is necessary for companies to have
appropriate motivation to avoid it. Yes, there's reputational damage involved,
but for situations where the brand / product is less central to the company,
the company can't be allowed to just walk away.

~~~
ahoyhere
Agree that liability is important.

In past "delete all user data" issues (I know there was at least one prior
case with Mac OS, but I don't remember details), Apple paid for hard drive
recovery service for those affected.

You can't always trust 'em (they're a big company after all), but they've
behaved honorably in the past.

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hristov
That's pretty amazing considering that the behaviour that causes the bug is
not something unusual or rare.

~~~
andrewtj
I doubt that many OS X users even know they can enable a guest account.

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borism
isn't it enabled by default? I know that disabling Guest is one of the first
things I do to a new Mac/PC/Linux machine.

~~~
ottbot
No, it's disabled by default - at least in Snow Leopard.

~~~
telemachos
The key question then is what happens _if_ you had enabled it in Leopard and
then you install Snow Leopard as an in-place upgrade.

It looks like Apple meant to have the setting revert, so that guest logins had
to be reenabled. Instead, you let your friend login to the (still-enabled)
guest account and then...

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oomkiller
This is the reason I NEVER upgrade, always a fresh install.

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anApple
At least one new feature in that service pack! :-)

