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

A brief update on Snow Leopard installs here at UKMac.net so far. After complaining about not receiving my pre-ordered Family Pack on Friday the postman arrived Saturday morning with a rather squished jiffy bag all the way from Ireland !

Due to other commitments this weekend I only had time to upgrade my MacBook on Saturday. This went fine, taking less than an hour from start to finish, so this afternoon the first of the to iMacs ( 20″ ) was upgraded and again no issues.

Finally tonight BigMac, my 24″ iMac was lined up for its turn. After running for about half an hour the install failed and I was offered the option to restore from Time Machine backup ! ARGH.

First check was to see if BigMac had actually started to upgrade so I opened Disk Utility which reported the drive correctly and stated that the OS was 10.5.8 so my first thought was that the install had not actually started and that the original OS may still be bootable. After setting the internal drive as the boot disk and rebooting I quickly realised this was NOT the case, the Mac just rebooted and powered off !

I then tried connecting BigMac using target disk mode to my MacBook to see if the drive still had my data on it. Target disk mode failed to work and the iMacs drive did not appear as a volume on the MacBook.

Next I booted back off the Snow Leopard install disk again and this time went into Terminal from the Options menu. A quick directory listing of /Volumes/Bigdisk ( BigMacs internal drive ) showed that all the data was in fact still intact so I decided to err on the side of caution and attach an external firewire drive and make a copy of the data before starting a clean install ( at this point the smart alecs in the audience will be saying, “should have made a bootable copy of system before starting the install”, which is entirely correct, however Bigdisk is 1Tb and I dont have another 1Tb drive to copy to so…. )

So at the moment I am still copying each directory from BigMacs home folder onto firewire disk so I can do a clean install. Before doing the clean install I may try the restore from Time Machine option just out of interest….

@Zerock sent me a tweet earlier this evening to say that he had experienced a similar install failure but he had not as yet attempted to recover the failed machine.

I would be keen to hear from other early adopters of Snow Leopard who have had similar ( or different ) problems with the upgrade this weekend. Drop me a line here or send me a tweet at @UKMac

Here in the UK the pre-order of Snow Leopard appears to have been a major FAIL. Many Mac users like myself pre-ordered Snow Leopard through the Apple Store with the expectation of the new Leopard landing on our door mats first thing on Friday morning, but the majority like myself waited in all day for nothing !

According to other @MyAppleStuff it appears that Spanish Mac users were similarly disappointed. Many countries on the other hand seemed to have more luck, Twitter was alive yesterday with reports of early deliveries from Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and US.

What was your experience yesterday ? Did you risk pre-ordering and if so from which suppliers ? Was your order delivered yesterday ? Do you think that pre-orders SHOULD arrive on day of release ? Will you go to Apple Store to buy next time ( UKMac Will ! )

Snow Leopard is now available to pre-order on Apples web site. UK Price is £25 for single licence or £39 for Family Pack ( up to 5 computers ). The site states that copies will ship before 28th August so with any luck if you order now you will receive your copy this weekend.

I suspect there are going to be a lot of Mac Users spending this weekend upgrading ! I know I will.

According to a number of reports including this one at Macrumors.com a customer in Japan received an unexpected surprise when he opened his newly purchased Mac Mini as the enclosed OS X Install DVD apparently was for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Whether this is a hoax or true is unclear but from the number of rumours spreading over the last week or so it is fairly clear that the launch date for Apples latest big cat is very close now.