Apple aware of "rare" Snow Leopard data-threatening bug, plans patch

Jonny Evans
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October 12, 2009
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Apple has confirmed it is “aware” of the widely-reported Snow Leopard data-munching bug which could occur when users logged in.

You can’t have missed the stories on this bug, which have flown across the Mac web since late last weekend, and grew to a clamor today. We reported the first signs of the problem last week.

One suggestion to prevent data loss is for users who had Guest accounts enabled under Leopard and then upgraded to Snow Leopard is to disable the Guest account and then re-enable it. This creates fresh Guest account settings created under Snow Leopard. Reports claim this eliminates the problem.

Here’s one description of what happened to one user: “A day before the crash there was no Guest account folder in the /Users directory. Just prior to the crash a Guest account folder appeared in the /Users directory on my start-up disk (not the partition my home folder is stored on). Post crash that Guest folder has disappeared again.”

At present, Apple’s assessment is that the problem is infrequent. The company provided Erica Ogg at Cnet with the following statement: “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”
 

Comments (7)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 12, 2009 - 6:32pm

Hi im a Pc

and I am.... >user not found<

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 12, 2009 - 8:22pm

hehe.. good one

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 13, 2009 - 2:26am

Dork...

John (not verified) | October 12, 2009 - 8:22pm

Okay, here's a solution for the interim: just disable the guest account on any computer that you have more critical data on.

For some of us, that's a permanent solution.

Oh, and backups -- always have a recent backup of your data should something catastrophic happen to your hardware, or software, or with humans who touch the computer.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 13, 2009 - 1:49am

Always have a recent backup of your data should something catastrophic happen to Apple's ability to write decent software! :(

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 13, 2009 - 4:36am

That snow leopard looks like a reincarnation of Ballmer...

http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ballmer.jpg

lnk (not verified) | October 13, 2009 - 8:36am

This is why I never upgrade an OS, be it Windows or Mac OS X. I do a fresh install instead. I've never trusted OS upgrades, and an 'archive & install' is what I can do better myself as well.


On a Mac it isn't hard to format the drive and move everything including applications back. OK, it's a little harder than in the OS 9 days where you just created a clean system folder and were done, but that's the price of progress I guess. Usually takes only an hour of extra work and since you'd only reinstall once in two years to upgrade to the next OS it's not something to complain about. But it can save you days of pain looking for some elusive bug, like a program refusing to work properly while it should or a setting that doesn't change, that kind of annoyances.


Reviewers also mention 'Snow Leopard has a faster startup time of ***50 seconds*** blah blah'. Well, from 10.4 to 10.5 my startup times have been ranging from 20 seconds on the fast PowerMacs and Intel Macs to 25 seconds on the slower, 4800 2.5" disk having G4 mini with unmodified, clean installs. No tweaks at all.
So yeah, I'm automatically assuming those reviewers do upgrades and that I definitely do not want to do that ever :P.


I also happen to do a lot of stuff on these machines, and while OS X barely fragments files it can easily create 500 000 free space fragments over time. A clean install would save time I'd have to spent defragging otherwise.


As for apple confirming the bug, well, that's nice... but shouldn't they have released a quick fix days ago? This has been known for nearly a week, right?