Apple aware of "rare" Snow Leopard data-threatening bug, plans patch

Apple has confirmed it is “aware” of the widely-reported Snow Leopard data-munching bug which could occur when users logged in.

You can’t have missed the stories on this bug, which have flown across the Mac web since late last weekend, and grew to a clamor today. We reported the first signs of the problem last week.

One suggestion to prevent data loss is for users who had Guest accounts enabled under Leopard and then upgraded to Snow Leopard is to disable the Guest account and then re-enable it. This creates fresh Guest account settings created under Snow Leopard. Reports claim this eliminates the problem.

Here’s one description of what happened to one user: “A day before the crash there was no Guest account folder in the /Users directory. Just prior to the crash a Guest account folder appeared in the /Users directory on my start-up disk (not the partition my home folder is stored on). Post crash that Guest folder has disappeared again.”

At present, Apple’s assessment is that the problem is infrequent. The company provided Erica Ogg at Cnet with the following statement: “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”