A number of reports have been circulating today about reports of a significant flaw in Snow Leopard that can cause loss of ALL data in your home folder. According to articles at NeoWin.net and Engadget this bug is triggered when you login using the Guest account and leads to ALL data in the Home folder of the normal user being completely erased. Recovery from backup is required as the files are apparently not recoverable.
Clearly I am not about to test out the premise but from what I can determine this issue is rare. The Apple support forum has a thread where a small number of posters are reporting this issue but it does not appear to be wide spread. Oddly all affected users claim to have selected the Guest account “by accident” ! How do you do this ? The Guest account is disabled by default. How many Mac users actually enable the Guest account ? I have certainly never felt the need to do this, if someone wants to check something on my Mac I let them use the account that is logged in. Perhaps I am more trusting than most ?
I have to say at this point that the reports seem to be greatly exaggerating this issue and clearly the Mac Hater community is having a little bit of a party today, using this as a wonderful piece of propaganda to bash Mac users and Apple. It will be interesting to see how this one develops.
Granted if this problem affected you, you are most likely going to be very upset at Apple and if it turns out that this is in fact a real bug in Guest account handling and not some weird interaction with another application and
I think this is getting so much press because it is a quite rare event in Apple software to have this kind of bug.
When you consider the plethora of Windows bugs that cause similar or worse problems to most users not to mention the security holes that are continually being plugged, it makes sense that this is news.
James Smith, João Pessoa, Brazil´s last blog ..Trees vs People