Reports have been
cropping up
on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data
due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple's latest Operating System.
Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most
data is gone,
according to iTWire.
The
problem, can easily be reproduced when a user logs into the 'guest'
account, either on purpose or by accident, and when they log back out
of the account and back into their normal one, they find that their
account has been fully reset with all data wiped and lost - the account
is like a brand new one. The home directory still exists under
"/Users/username" but is completely empty.
Users are reporting
that the data is unrecoverable and cannot be found anywhere on the hard
drive, and the only way to restore it is if the user has been
performing backups on a separate hard-drive. Apparently the problem has
been present since a few days after launch, as the forum post dates
back to 12th September, but as of yet, Apple has been silent.
It seems the
only work around
at this stage is to disable the Guest account, or at least disable it
and then re-enabling it so that it's a native Snow Leopard account.
Another suggestion is to create a new account and enforce parental
controls, if you really need a temporary account.
It's not clear
how many users are affected, but it seems like any user who had Leopard
before the upgrade, and had the guest account enabled are affected and
are at risk.