November 5th, 2007

This Leopard bug beats anything Vista has to offer

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 7:08 pm

Categories: Apple, My Leopard Experience

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Bug, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

In this blog I’ve highlighted a number of Vista related bugs, some of which are trivial, others pretty serious, but today I’ve come across a bug in Leopard that beats anything Microsoft has to offer in Vista hands down - this bug is serious because it causes widespread data loss, and it’s easy to replicate.

The issue has been covered in detail over on Tom Karpik’s blog.  Here’s the lowdown on this bug:

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

So, you use Finder to pick a folder to move to a different volume and start the moving process.  If however, something happens to cause that volume to go offline during the move process then your original copy of the data in the folder that you were moving is deleted as though the move process was completed successfully.  Bye-bye data.  Any files not moved to the destination volume are lost.  I’m guessing that the OS assumes that the move operation has completed correctly and cleans up after itself, unwittingly deleting files that haven’t been moved. 

This is the sort of bug that’ll make you appreciate that you took the time to become acquainted with Time Machine.

I’ve replicated this bug on my install of Leopard following Karpik’s instructions and the problem seems to occur every time without fail.  This bug would make me vary wary of moving data across a wireless network to a remote system - an interruption to the WiFi connection could nuke your data. 

I’m hoping to take a closer look at the file system tomorrow to see if the files are still hidden there somewhere - maybe in a temp file or something.  I also want to examine other circumstances when this error could kick in - for example, does this happens when moving between the file system and USB flash drives?

I’m seriously beginning to wonder if anyone beta tested this OS. 

Thoughts?