We generally don’t report on individual bugs or security issues in operating systems, but a pretty serious bug has reared its ugly head in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you had a guest account enabled prior to installing Snow Leopard, then you are at risk of losing all your data.
The bug is not 100% reproducible, but the number of posts on Apple’s support forums is rising (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It is said that if you had your guest account enabled prior to installing Snow Leopard, then it could be that after you login as a guest user after installing Snow Leopard, the data in your regular account will be gone. As in, deleted.
It is speculated that the actual bug is that after logging in to the Leopard-created guest account while running Snow Leopard, your regular account gets treated like a guest account – as in, all data deleted after log out, settings returned to default, and so on.
“When I logged into my MacBook Pro this morning, it was as if I had logged into my Guest Account and not my standard user profile,” user parshallnet said, “No icons on the desktop, the desktop wallpaper was the default ‘space’ photo and not the one I had assigned, no documents in the docs folder, apps behaved as if I’d never opened them before.”
Reports of this serious bug first started appearing right after Snow Leopard shipped, but the problem has yet to be resolved. A temporary precaution is to disable the guest account, or to create a regular account and restrict it using parental controls. For users who encountered the bug and have lost all their data – unless you have a backup, you’re pretty much done for. Your data will be gone.
right? You backed everything up , right? Ya might want to back it up now…..
I’m always blowing up installs,updates, so I use my gmail account to back up my /home/ed folder in linux. Never fails to save my butskie, and it’s free !! Hopefully mac fixes, and soon, as this could be a real show-stopper at work.
Edited 2009-10-12 20:17 UTC
Are you sure “everyone”? ALL Mac users?
Yes making backups is good, but not everyone does it. I do backups and put it on online storage, but not using Time Machine.
Anyway, this bug (or feature) on Snow Leopard is not acceptable. Imagine you have a friend come to your home and want to borrow your Mac, you login as Guest for him/ her. After he/ she used your computer, you will find that all your data is lost when you login to your primary account, no one knows if you will blame him/ her for the lost.
There will always be bugs that are “unacceptable,” e.g. the UAC backdoor in Windows 7 comes to mind as one I think of as such. I find this one just as reprehensible. However, the bug is still there and bugs are inevitable in a large software project. Bugs that don’t reproduce predictably are especially difficult to track down particularly if the developers and testers didn’t happen to encounter it.
Now, my question is, does this apply to 10.6.1 as well, or is it limited to straight 10.6?
..and MS got equally got some bad PR amongst the same tech sites like Apple are now.
So I don’t really see why you’re bringing that up
Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t that what beta testing is all about?
In my opinion, having ones profile deleted is never an acceptable bug.
Edited 2009-10-13 01:58 UTC
First Microsoft, now Apple cause people to loose data. What is the world coming to? LOL
I’m reading a Stephen Baxter novel where there are some monks living on an island, making hand copies of all the literature they can, and then a bunch of Vikings show up and kill them. Cutting through the sternum and ripping out the lungs of the stunned victim seems a particularly popular way to impress one’s Viking buddies in the post-Roman former Western Empire. And then they burned the Scriptorium.
Data loss has apparently declined somewhat in flair over the intervening centuries.
Edited 2009-10-12 21:37 UTC
Touché.
Data loss has always happened. Buildings burning down has always been a particular problem. At least these days we have the opportunity of creating mutliple copies of said data.
BUT I am going to give the strong pimp hand to ANY fool who loves the system provided accounts on Windows or Mac. Is it that hard for granny to use?
-cmon would you?
Apple should just remove the “guest login” ability from Mac OS X; they’ve been having nothing but trouble with it, and it looks like they can’t be bothered to test it. Looks like they can’t be bothered to program it correctly, actually.
Just remove it so nobody gets their system compromised again, and nobody loses their data again!
I wonder how difficult is to implement the code to remove the guest directory and recreate it that it messes with another account.
Well considering the guest account is disabled by default the only thing enabled is that guest accounts can access Shared folders (if permissions allow). So you’d have to create a Guest account or figure out how to enable it on a machine where it is already disabled (which is most).
Works for me though. I’ve had it enabled along with the FileVault encrypted profiles on two macs and nothing terrible happened after upgrading to Snow Leopard.
I’m truly amazed by apple developers, who are not willing to test and fix this. I’m on the users’ side this time. The fact that the bug is hard to reproduce, speaks bad for (rotten) apple’s devs. Then, they mock at some poor guy, probably someone at the age of my father, because of lack of backup. Come on people, backing up like a crazy paranoic is not the daily task most people do. But anyway, I wouldn’y buy Mac anyway, if I need FreeBSD with KDE 4, I can do it myself at no cost. Plus the lack of mocking in the forums. NO thanks. Backups ? There are SVN / CVS systems for docs / code, the rest is downloadable …
If you stop to think about this for a second, you’ll realise just how stupid that sounds. If you can’t reproduce a bug, how exactly are you supposed to fix it? Are Apple developers supposed to be masters of psychic debugging now?
I wonder why this is happening. I have three Macs at home. All have had activated guest accounts. All three were upgraded to 10.6. None have had the problem.
The solution to prevent the problem is to go to prefs/accounts and to close the account and then open it again.
I often think that when a small number of people have a problem, it’s due to some third party software or hardware mucking thing up.
Neither Apple nor MS can test for much third party stuff, software, or hardware.
No, I don’t. If a bug is hard to reproduce, it means that the code is written bad, and it does not behave correctly. In a simple if statement, if the input equals 1, it will print one, else it will print 2. Just an example. Apparently, there’s a chain of events that triggers this bug, and so far people have described their steps, as far as I can see from their forum. But hey, whatever the problem is, as I stated above, I don’t think I will pay for neither Windows, nor Mac. I maintain my own Linux system for more than 5 years, and it doesn’t have such issues. Besides, the general attitude of Apple towards their developers is somehow public available, you just need to know where to look.
That’s all folks, you won’t see me here in the near future, so don’t bother sending me offending messages, aiming to convince me in this and that.
I’m not going to defend Apple for this bug but this reasoning is just wrong. You’re basically saying that good programming create more obvious and glaring bugs and that bad programming create obscure bugs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/13/snow_leopard_data_eating_bu…
The Register reports that data loss reports date back to November, 2007.