A bug that has been around for a little while is now doing the rounds of Internet. It affects Snow Leopard and can cause a total loss of data as Tobias tells us:
This morning, I login to my guest account under Snow Leopard and after having finished I go on my admin account, I realized that none of my files are there, no music, no documents, no bookmarks etc…. !
I do not panic, I have made a time machine backup 2 day ago, I make several Internet searches and find that I am not alone in this case and that Snow Leopard has a bug. Thus I advise to make a backup and to deactivate your guest account and to create a standard account without a password if you are running Snow Leopard.
The bug occurs under particular conditions. It is necessary to have made an updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard and that a guest account was configured under 10.5. After this transition to Snow Leopard, the bug happens if one logs into this infamous guest account. Then for the user account then launched next after using this guest account, all the data is completely erased. The activation of a guest account is rare (see the survey in progress), the bug has fortunately affected only a few people. To safeguard oneself against this, one should go in the user preferences, deactivated the guest account and then to reactivate it.
Apple will work to fix this bug. Those who, like Tobias, took our advice to make regular backups will have only suffered a small fright.
