Major Snow Leopard Bug Said To Delete User Data 353
inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.
This is a bad bug, yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
...the average user is not very likely to get hit by it, fortunately. Hopefully they'll have a fix out quickly nonetheless.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
~Philly
I don't want to feed the trolls but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh. (Score:5, Interesting)
What surprises me is that MS hasn't done much in the area(unless you are willing to go all the way to Windows Home Server). Architecturally, Volume Shadow Copy is abundantly powerful and has been available since before Time Machine even hit the scene; but you certainly wouldn't know about it from looking at any of the advertising, documentation, or spec sheets for non-server Microsoft OSes.
Re:Guess they never tested that function... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's explicitly noted that it doesn't happen every time. It's very likely they did test it, and just missed it. It's not necessarily an excuse, but bugs do happen, and this has not been reported during the beta – meaning it's either exceptionally rare or a very recent bug. I'd bet on the former.
On a different note, the CNET article takes a very sensationalist approach with using the phrase "plagued with bugs". There's a few bugs, reported by a vocal minority of users (one of which they list – incompatibilities – isn't really a bug, just a consequence of being a new OS version with new features, changed features, and a few removed features*). I've been using Snow Leopard for the past month-and-a-half, and have experienced only a tiny handful of non-damaging crashes. One kernel panic, about three or four Safari crashes. It's around the average number of problems I've experienced on most OS/version combinations.
* One such removal is a relatively undocumented 'hack' called "InputManagers" which loads code into every Cocoa application that starts up. These no longer work in 64-bit applications, and such plugin functionality has to be re-implemented using either an application-specific plugin format (where available) or as a mach_inject background process.
Re:Oh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you're kidding, but Time Capsule has been upsold in the past for a similar reason.
Remember Backup.app from the .Mac suite? It was touted as a complete remote backup solution for a couple of years, until Apple changed their tune in Knowledge Base articles and began describing it as a modest service intended for browser bookmarks and user settings. The reason? Restoring files was prone to data loss.
Time Capsule + Time Machine appeared shortly thereafter, and Apple made a big, intentional splash about how this particular hardware and software combination will keep your data safe.
Re:not the only problem with the leopard (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is, flaming Apple is an absolute waste of time. The sort of people who buy Apple are convinced (with decent evidence) that Apple is the Greatest Thing Ever, and nothing short of personally experiencing a catastrophic failure like this will convince them otherwise.
Windows, on the other hand, is generally recognized (with decent evidence) as a total clusterfuck, so reminding that they could get Linux for free instead of putting up with that shit is actually likely to net some converts.
Re:Oh man. Nightmare. (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but I can imagine how this happened. The guest user account is designed to erase itself after you log out. So there must have been some screw up to where the "erase user after log out" code got applied to the real user instead of to a guest user. It's a real shame that this wasn't caught in testing before it could burn an end user, but I can see how a bug like this could slip through the cracks.
Still, the team in charge of the programming guest user account at Apple must feel like absolute crap right now for letting this major bug through.
Re:Oh man. Nightmare. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is) for the guest account. Then they don't have to delete anything, it disappears automatically.
I used to use tmpfs for guest accounts on my ubuntu box for just that reason. That along with encrypted swap files with random keys generated on loading makes "deleting guest data" irrelevant (and lets you resize the temporary device on the fly arbitrarily high by adding more swap if you realize you're going to exceed your available physical ram or allotted space)
You can populate the guest dir from a new-user template, or use unionfs type dealies.
What I did was probably all wrong, but my point remains that you shouldn't have to delete stuff when you're done with the guest account. At the most, you should only have to forget a temporary encryption key, which ought to happen automagically in the event of a hard reboot.
Another showstopping bug (Score:4, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I am Apple user and have been since my Apple IIe in 1984. I began using Macs in 1991 and have a lot of experience with them. In other words, I'm not your average user and I'm extra careful with my data and my setup. I create a bootable backup before upgrading, etc.
When I upgrade to Snow Leopard I installed Rosetta because some of the software I depend upon cannot be run without it. While using this piece of amazing and somewhat buggy software [eastgate.com] my screen went blue and I was "spontaneously logged out." I encounter this problem only in the buggy software but I am not the only one experiencing such problems. Apparently there are scores if not hundreds (thousands?) of users affected by this "spontaneous log out [apple.com]." No amount of backing up is going to completely protect you if your computer goes tits up for no discernible reason at all.
I love me some Apple products but I also recognize some of those products have serious QA issues which are not only unaddressed but Apple has not even acknowledged them. Such bugs are not the fault of "extraordinary" users even if we can understand how a very esoteric and hard-to-replicate bugs may not show up in the testing phase.
Re:Apple.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Can you take legal action? (Score:3, Interesting)
"bridge must withstand x pounds and last y years" is a pretty straightforward requirement for a bridge. "Don't go bang and burn down a house" is similarly so for a gadget. Software, however has a multitude of requirements -- and of different kinds, be it speed, usability, security, interoperability, and on and on. And that's not even to mention that software is usually expected to do a number of actual tasks for the user. In the end, an OS has likely millions of requirements and in the case of this article, one of them is, "don't delete the administrator's data when a crash happens while logged into the guest account." Yep, this is a horrible, awful bug of the worst degree, but hey, it's not like the fanbois won't buy macs because of it. Not quite the same as a life and death issue, especially since you can back up data, but not your car once its gone over the edge.
But, back to the bridge for a second: most poorly designed roads and bridges are torn down before they fall on their own, and well after they're built. The individual engineers generally get off scot free for doing bad work that only comes to light years after it was built.
Re:Can you take legal action? (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not a programmer, but my career has been built on managing storage (disk, vtl and tape). While data loss cannot kill you, in the physical sense. I'm sure that if you lost something that was irreplaceable or unrecreateable. We've heard of the 'mental anguish' that people who have lost their WoW characters have suffered from. I think some of them even committed suicide.
If EMC/HDS/HP/IBM released disk array firmware/microcode that corrupted user data, you can bet their customers/corporations would be suing the hell out of the vendor. Trust me on this one, I've taken part in such legal action and I've also taken part in actions to kick out a vendor who's disk array ran into a major firmware bug when a IO board was replaced. That vendor is nolonger providing product to my company. Would anybody return their Mac because of this? Doubt it.
Most would say, "Well it's just a computer being a computer, they have bugs, crash, it's normal for them to lose data."
Try replacing the word computer with bridge/airplane/car brakes/traffic lights etc etc.
With people putting more and more sentimental information on their computer systems, instead of in a shoebox/photo album, one can nolonger say that photos don't contain value, they could be considered priceless. Ask people who have had their house burn to the ground what it means to lose all of their sentimental information (wedding albums, baby shoes etc etc).
Re:Can you take legal action? (Score:1, Interesting)
You're not a real engineer. Software engineers are not real engineers - mechanical, civil, electrical, but anyway, bridges are built to multiple variables - the materials, wear and tear, metal fatigue, weather, vibration, structural integrity of the bedrock they're embedded in and many, many more I'm sure.
The OS only has to avoid deleting or corrupting data. It doesn't have to protect the user from himself. It has to make sure that no-matter what the subsystem handling IO does not f-up. What the higher level component does is not the fault of the system. Pressing the Delete key will delete data. But changing user accounts should not delete data. Removing a USB stick suddenly with write-behind caching disabled while the stick is idle should not corrupt it. There's not much here, it's not rocket science.
How often does user sofware make as much money as the construction of a bridge?
How much has Windows made for MS? Do you think a construction company makes more on a bridge than MS on the sale of its OS? or Apple? Economies of scale. Each OS copy is cheap but millions are sold.
How old is the software industry compared to bridge building?
Not very old, either. It's just that engineers respect fundamentals and maybe know what they're doing?
How variable are software problems compared to bridge problems?
How variable? How about don't delete my data by mistake. The component doing the IO has to work properly, the major variability lies with higher level programs which use this component. There the user could press Delete or overwrite important data - that you can't protect against.
Oh and by the way there have been some catastrophic bridge failures.
Sure there have but the industry learns from them.