I hope everybody is backing up their computers regularly and that they can restore from Time Machine. It’s simple to use, external drives are inexpensive these days, and it just makes sense.

This IS bad. And Microsoft found out just how bad too with their new Sidekick phones that wiped out all user data on their servers.

And we’re supposed to trust cloud computing? NOT. It’s no more inherently safe than desktop computing.

I wonder if this situation is not as widespread as it could be because not too many people are letting “guests” use that account. I have no idea of the numbers, I am just pondering the situation.

This is odd. I had a housesitter use my iMac with the guest account, and no one lost any data. There must be more to this that just the guest account.

If you’re not backing up your data, then you are as much at fault as Apple.  Quit pointing fingers, and take responsibility.

Do you remember how you set it up in your implementation?

I enabled the Guest account only when it was time for the house-sitter to use the computer. This was considerably after the upgrade to Snow Leopard.

In the Apple Discussions messages, I started to get the impression that the deleted home directory was not on the boot partition also.

I find it curious that this issue, first covered weeks ago in MacFixit, is just now becoming a “problem” that must urgently be fixed by Apple, right on the heels of the horrendous news of Microsoft’s failure to backup T-Mobile’s Sidekick phones. Is it a coincidence, another manipulation scheme, or just me being curious?

By-the-way, who has said it is “widespread?” And, if it’s not widespread how can it be an OS X problem? Is it possible other installed software, possibly in combination with OS X can be the culprit?

If it’s such a problem, widespread or not, why is it just now coming to the surface? I contend it’s not as widespread as is being dug up. We’ll see. I simply sick and tired of planted stories ruining our companies, and running our countries.

Just as AAPL is on a careful rise, this! Dang I’m mad.

It is a guest account… when you select a guest account, even in leopard, the system preference pane tells you that the contents of that account will be deleted upon log out.  Why would you STORE INFORMATION YOU MAY LATER NEED in a guest account. 

This is much ado about nothing and for those folks whom lost data due to storage under a ‘temporary’ guest account as per the system panel information, shame on you.  Add to the NO BACKUPS, double shame… and shame on the ‘reporting community’ for making this more than it is.. 

Nothing to see here, move along.

“You missed something, UpQuark: The data being deleted is in the non-Guest accounts.

Much to see here.”

Yup, you are right.. I did miss something.  From my initial read, I gleaned that only the Guest data was lost.  Upon further review however..  

This is a HUGE issue. Wow..  Unbelievable!

It doesn’t matter if they had backups or not, you are right, their home folder should be left up to the user to decimate, not Apple…

Thanks!

This IS bad. And Microsoft found out just how bad too with their new Sidekick phones that wiped out all user data on their servers.

It’s silly to compare this very rare—and recoverable—problem with Microsoft’s Sidekick disaster.

Recovering from this particular issue just requires a few Terminal commands. On the other hand, there is no recovery for the thousands of Sidekick users.

We mock Microsoft (quite rightly) in their two-hour complicated routine for converting from XP to the exotically named Windows 7. But this is worse. Much worse. 10.6.2 coming up smartly, perhaps?

On the other hand, there is no recovery for the thousands of Sidekick users.

I read last evening that they think they can recover the Sidekick data.

Anyone willing to test this?  Does it happen if you have file vault running?