Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 October 2009 10:42
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Much has been written about a (supposedly) rarely-surfacing bug in Mac OS X Snow Leopard involving guest accounts. It seems that the missing data might not be deleted after all.
"It's not dead, it's resting." So said the shopkeeper in Monty Python's dead parrot sketch. He was trying to pull the wool over the customer's eyes, but the sentiment may be applicable to Snow Leopard.
As reported by iTWire and other outlets, Mac OS X 10.6 has a
bug that can surface after a user logs into the Guest account. When they subsequently log into their normal account, their data has disappeared.
Apple has confirmed the existence of the bug, saying it "occurs only in extremely rare cases".
Knowing that it is rare is small comfort to those affected. But the main reason it is rare is because the Guest account is traditionally intended for use with shared folders, and unless you've been messing around with settings it is not possible to log in as Guest.
That said, there is a good reason to enabling the Guest account. It works a bit like Safari's private browsing feature in that all of the files created by the account are automatically deleted on logout. That provides a clue
Anyway, the vast majority of users have no chance of encountering the bug. Furthermore, even if the Guest account is enabled for login, there's still only a slim chance that the bug will strike.
As I said, that wouldn't make you feel any better if you were staring at an effectively empty home folder.
But there is some good news, so please
read on.
