Oh, Snow Leopard Frees Up Disk Space All Right
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 13, 2009 at 9:00 AM PT
Apple has finally acknowledged that a bug in its new Snow Leopard operating system can, on rare occasions, result in a catastrophic loss of data. The glitch, which first surfaced in support forums in early September, is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account and wipes the main user account of all data.
“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,” one Snow Leopard user explained in Apple’s Support Discussions. “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.”
Clearly, this is not what Apple (AAPL) meant when it claimed the OS would free up as much as seven gigs of space upon installation.
Obviously, this is a nasty flaw, and it’s a pity it has taken Apple this long to cop to it. But it has and, as the company told News.com yesterday, a remedy should be forthcoming. Said an Apple rep: “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”
Comments
Cue the Apple fan boys outrage at this post…..
Posted by Kevin Dent at October 13th, 2009 at 11:44 am> Cue the Apple fan boys
By “fan boys” do you mean people who would use a Mac even if it was 10 years behind everyone else and was the only platform to suffer viruses that share your data with the world and malware that literally steals money from your bank account? Because that sounds like Windows users to me. You have to be a fan boy to be using Windows in 2009 after 10 years of massive technical failures at Microsoft.
Any data loss bug is significant, but the Mac’s Time Machine feature makes it very easy to restore your home folder within minutes. My Mac’s boot disk crashed a few months ago and I didn’t lose any data. Time Machine restored the whole system automatically once a new disk was put in. So this bug really does not upset me, it just makes me happy that Apple spent years developing and deploying Time Machine. The Mac OS is resilient enough that it can fix the after effects of this bug all by itself.
And all a user has to do to activate Time Machine is plug a backup disk into their Mac. That is all. So there is no excuse for not having an hourly backup of your Mac. That has been a feature of Mac OS for some years now.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at October 13th, 2009 at 6:56 pm