Leopard Revives Data-Loss Bug From OS X 10.1

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Buying an Apple product on the first day it’s available is a recipe for disaster. This universal truth was reiterated today as Macintouch reported a nasty bug in Leopard where if you move a file to an external drive and then unplug the drive before it finishes copying, it will delete the file from the source and the destination drive.

In our test, we used Command-drag to move several large folders from a MacBook internal drive to an attached FireWire 800 external drive. While the folders were being moved, we disconnected the FireWire cable. The folders disappeared from both drives!

Yikes. Not an incredibly common flaw, but definitely easy enough to do that it should never show up in a shipping product — especially because it was present in OS X 10.1, and not inTiger. That’s a step in the wrong direction.

Thanks, Andrew!
Image via SadMac.org

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8 responses to “Leopard Revives Data-Loss Bug From OS X 10.1”

  1. root says:

    Have you tried using Time Machine to see if you could get back your file/directory ?

  2. Gouldsc says:

    I actually had this happen to me because Leopard locked up (couldn’t even do a force quit/relaunch of the finder). I did a hard reboot and then Leopard wasn’t recognizing my external drive. I just assumed it was a glitch in Leopard (and that my data was still there) until I read this and freaked out. Well I just ran repair disk from the disk utility and it fixed my disk. I had to eject it and re-mount it to see my data again. I hope this helps anyone who may be suffering from this particularly nasty bug.

  3. Steve Ballmer says:

    Leopold is dangerous!
    For you and your kids sake go with Vista!

    [Don’t push it with self-promoting spam, Steve]

  4. Ian Adams says:

    That would be what is known as a “regression bug”. It usually occurs when a new bit of code basically revives an old, previously fixed bug. I would definitely expect this to be fixed in the 10.5.1 update. Sucks that they didn’t catch it before shipping, but as a software tester I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that something like this happened.