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There is some talk on the Apple forums that a bug in Snow Leopard is behind the loss of all data in a user’s account if they access a Guest account. More to the point, if one logs into a Guest account, logs out, and then accesses their normal account, their information is toast.
Snow Leopard bug waxes user data. (IMG: Apple)
One accounting of the issue, offered by Macintosh user Daniel, is here. According to Daniel’s report, he accidently accessed the Guest account on his Snow Leopard installation. He waited a few minutes and returned to the main login screen where he entered his normal account information.
“So once I was returned I logged on as my normal user, to find my Desktop reset, my Dock reset, my Documents, Music and Photos reset and all my software reset. So I restarted my computer and logged on again, it was exactly the same, everything gone. At which point I looked in the Users folder to find that my User profile had been removed and replaced with a fresh one with the same name,” Daniel explained in his letter.
He’s not the only one with the issue. In his report Daniel lists four threads with comments from others who have used the Guest account to reset their profiles inadvertently. Searching Apple’s support offered nothing related to the problem, so it is assumed by many that Apple is unaware of it, which is odd considering the number of people impacted.
While many are hesitant to reproduce the issue for testing, some have noted that it doesn’t matter if you used the guest account previously or not, the main account will be wiped either way. Others have noted that this is only an issue if you had the Guest account active in OS X 10.5 before updating to Snow Leopard, but there is no consistency with those claims. Some can confirm that line of thought, others who didn’t have Guest active before the update lost data all the same. In the end, the frustrating issue is that this will impact some, while others are having no problems at all.
For now, the advice is to disable the guest account until there is a fix. There is also a suggestion on MacFixIt that says to create a standard account for temporary use, and restrict it with parental controls. Of course, if you have a current Time Machine backup or system backup, then this isn’t that big of an issue, as you can always restore.
If anyone has seen this, drop us a line below and talk about your experience.
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