Snow Leopard Bug May Delete User Data
If you’re still not convinced about the need for regular backups, maybe talking with some Snow Leopard users will. The Apple support boards are buzzing with reports of Leopard users finding data zapped.
“Users start their Macs up as normal only to find they’ve logged in as ‘Guests’ on their machine – with all the files and data held on their Mac in their own user account seemingly deleted,” according to 9to5.
About 18 percent of Mac users have upgraded to Snow Leopard since its release August 28, we reported earlier this month.
A tell-tale sign of the problem is the automatic creation of a Guest account. Just prior to your /users data vanishing, a “Guest” account is created. “Post crash that Guest folder has disappeared again,” writes one poster on Apple’s Discussion area. The problem may also appear if you’d previously created a Guest account.
What to do until Apple corrects the bug (not mentioned in the OSX 10.6.1 update)? Backup, backup, backup, advises Cnet. “We strongly urge everyone to use Time Machine or a similar full system backup for this very purpose, and hopefully those who are affected have a recent backup handy.”
For more discussion on the bug, check out the Apple Discussions forums.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
