Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data

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.)<p>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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!<p>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.

More constructive questions:<p>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?<p>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?

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.

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

Great, first the cloud, now local computers. Paper can suffer water damage or be burned. Moral of the stories: your data is never safe.<p>Redundant backups/distributions is the true way to go.

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

I almost feel like it's "lose all user data week".<p>Anyway hope this kind of situations are well handled by Apple EULA.

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

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