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Snow Leopard Bug Responsible for Loss of User Data Gaining Notice
- Thread starter fpbecker
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They did.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/25403
Can I ask any one of the 16 people who voted 'Positive' to this story one question..
why?
Really depends on their OS and level of self-inflicted system abuse, IMHO. In their case it was a poorly protected installation of XP.
It was weeks/months before I even heard about the problem having occurred. I have recovery software on my Mac (needed it for a corrupted memory card once and it worked great) and would gladly have tried to recover the digital photos if nothing else, but by the time I heard anything had happened the computer was replaced by a brand new one and the old one given away on Kijiji.
Standard Time Machine backup interval is 1 hour which covers most people adequately. I have mine turned down to 3 hours since I found hourly backups overkill, but at the very least I have onsite an offsite backups that are never more then 24 hours old. If I'm doing something that requires more frequent backups (DV editing on occasion in my case) I'll turn that interval down, or make frequent saves to an external drive, or if I'm being extremely anal that day, two.
All that aside, any standard Time Machine operating it right out of the box would never have more then 59 minutes of lost data in the worst case scenario. For your average user, that's more the adequate.
Anyone running mission critical data is probably already backing up in a far more rigorous method than Time Machine anyways - onsite, offsite, RAID, etc..well, unless you're *cough cough* Danger.
(Sorry, OT, but couldn't resist)
It just works.®
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I rolled back to Leopard last week, so no probs here. Maybe the next patch will put the majority of SL's flounderings to rest and I'll upgrade.
..or maybe not. 10.5 is workin just fine.
This is how it happened to me:
1: Clean install
2: Create initial admin user using setup wizard
3. enable guest user
4. login as guest, notice that you get the shake window, look confused
5. login as your user
6. GASP all my files are gone! (All files I have are both backed up to my NAS, as well as my desktop, so data loss wasn't an issue for me)
My only guess is that the process the erases a guest user's files upon logout is running against the first admin user of the system upon a subsequent login after logging into guest. I have not been able to reproduce this under anything other than the first admin user created with the setup utility.
Initially I thought it was due to basic Unix permissions (first user on an OSX system is usually 501) but I later noticed that the guest user account has a unix ID of 201. I do know that when the guest user logs out all files owned by 201 are deleted... somehow it was applied to 501 as well.
So yeah... my main fix for now... is to create a generic "Admin" user, the create your user. It *should* be safe then to use the Guest account, and not lose any of your data. (Dont come chase me down if it still does though!)
This was also sent to apple in the form of a bug report...
1: Clean install
2: Create initial admin user using setup wizard
3. enable guest user
4. login as guest, notice that you get the shake window, look confused
5. login as your user
6. GASP all my files are gone! (All files I have are both backed up to my NAS, as well as my desktop, so data loss wasn't an issue for me)
My only guess is that the process the erases a guest user's files upon logout is running against the first admin user of the system upon a subsequent login after logging into guest. I have not been able to reproduce this under anything other than the first admin user created with the setup utility.
Initially I thought it was due to basic Unix permissions (first user on an OSX system is usually 501) but I later noticed that the guest user account has a unix ID of 201. I do know that when the guest user logs out all files owned by 201 are deleted... somehow it was applied to 501 as well.
So yeah... my main fix for now... is to create a generic "Admin" user, the create your user. It *should* be safe then to use the Guest account, and not lose any of your data. (Dont come chase me down if it still does though!)
This was also sent to apple in the form of a bug report...
You lost your data because of a virus/malware or perhaps failing (cheap) hardware. Not because Windows decided to erase your profile after logging in with a Guest account. That happens only on a Mac.
I must say I'm very happy I resisted the temptation to upgrade immediately and become Apple's guinea pig.
Which is another way of saying that they love to publish rumors about new products, but if there is possible 'news' about something bad, you won't hear it until they are SURE. Journalistic standards, and all that.
For Windows, I recommend a Task Scheduler task to run a robocopy job every x times per day/week. When using the /MIR (mirror) option in robocopy, it only copies new or updated files/directories. There are no prompts and you can even include an exclusion list of files (/XF) or folders (/XD). I also enable the log file output so I can review the copy process. I use this method to back up my documents and music to my Time Capsule, though I do not have it on a set schedule (currently run on demand).
robocopy.exe Source Destination /MIR
robocopy.exe c:\Music D:\Music_Backup /mir /XD:C:\Music\CrappyMusicThatIdontwanttobackup /LOG:C:\music_backup.log
MS updated robocopy in Windows 7 to include multi-threaded support with the /MT option. I haven't yet tested it, but it should make it significantly faster on a multi-core system, when copying to a local disk. I don't think robocopy is included in XP, but is part of the Resource Kit tools that can be downloaded from MS.
Call me anal-retentive, but I keep offsite backups of my absolutely essential files, mainly my digital pictures and anything not stored on the cloud, which nowadays, is increasingly little.
By the way, there's an interesting utility called ddrescue which can recover bad DVDs.
One feature is that if you make several copies of the DVD, it can merge the good blocks so that you can recover the data even if all of the DVD have some errors. (It does assume that errors are independent, and a particular sector isn't bad on all copies.)
This can be abbreviated: "either you need to have a backup of your data, or don't have valuable data"
Staying with 10.5.8 until Apple recognizes data loss and fixes the bug. Staying on Leopard means I am not upgrading to Logic 9, which means Apple will not be getting my software dollars until SL is reasonably stable.
Sounds like your HD is failing. Not a fault of any OS, but of hardware. If you've backed up, replace the HD ASAP.
HaHa. I just fixed my dead 18 months old TC but fortunately never had another account on my network
And yes, someone is really piised off out thereI'm sure it's been said, but part of locking down OSX is to disable the Guest account unless you have a particular reason to need it (computer labs, etc...). You always want to lessen the attack surface by as much as possible regardless of the OS you are using.
Did you click on the lock in the bottom left corner of the box, then enter your user password... that's it almost every time when people don't understand that. If you don't have access to anything in system just click the lock and enter password and accept... that easy.
Which is why I never install the latest and greatest. I'll wait for 10.6.6 or 10.6.7 before I think of even installing Snow Leopard and avoid the aggravation! Hope your situation improves...
Not the end of the world, but I lost my /Users/Shared data when I upgraded. Irritatingly this contained my Parallels hdd file that I didn't backup with Time Machine (because daily 10gb binary backups are no fun on TM).
Oh well.
Oh well.
Any evidence that SL was "rushed"? I'm not buying it, myself. SL has had _way_ fewer issues than any other version of OS/X at this point in it's release. This single bug is certainly not enough to convince me that it wasn't ready, since it could've made it through anyway. At some point you have to stop testing and release - you are ALWAYS going to have bugs, and you can't test forever.
But maybe I'm just more understanding since we are right at the end of a 18 month release cycle ourselves...
I think it's this, the driver issues and the fact they're rushing out not one but two point releases in a very short period of time.
That said, I don't see the point in SL trying to beat W7 to market as neither is really going to impact the other's sales.
Vista and Windows 7 have builtin backups with scheduling, no need to use command line tools. Go to "Control Panel" -> "Backup and Restore".
Also note that /MIR will delete the entire directory structure in some cases, so if you have a user error and delete part of the directory tree - robocopy will dutifully delete all those files on the "backup".
A more elegant solution is to get a Windows Home Server system. It will backup up to 10 systems on your network - even waking them from sleep to backup if necessary (and returning them to sleep).
Both Vista backup and WHS backup save old versions - so in the event of an accidentally deleted directory the latest backup version will show a missing directory, but older versions of backups will have your files.
(A 1TB WHS that's easily expandable to 7 TB is about $90 more than a 1 TB Time Capsule.)
Happened to me
It's true. Last week I logged in to Guest and then restarted (I'd "upgraded" to SL). Afterward, everything was lost from the Desktop and in all but one of my Documents folder of my Admin account. Over 100 GB gone. It was odd that a shortcut I made for the Document folder showed two more folders than were shown by clicking on Documents (still, 7 will missing). Coincident with the loss is an inability to register that computer with MobileMe (other computers register just fine). I had CCC and Time Machine, so nothing was lost. But still a shocking experience.
It's true. Last week I logged in to Guest and then restarted (I'd "upgraded" to SL). Afterward, everything was lost from the Desktop and in all but one of my Documents folder of my Admin account. Over 100 GB gone. It was odd that a shortcut I made for the Document folder showed two more folders than were shown by clicking on Documents (still, 7 will missing). Coincident with the loss is an inability to register that computer with MobileMe (other computers register just fine). I had CCC and Time Machine, so nothing was lost. But still a shocking experience
.