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A Leopard ate my data

Another bug in Apple's finest
Tuesday, 6 November 2007, 09:02

A BOGGER has turned up another bug, which causes huge levels of data loss in the fruit themed outfit, Apple's new operating system Leopard.

Tom Karpik said that Leopard’s Finder function has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code. This can lead to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action.

He first spotted the bug when Samba crashed while he was moving a directory from his desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

Karpik said that the bug always appears when the destination disappears while the Finder is moving something to the destination.

Moving file from one volume to another is an operation that involves copying the data and then deleting it on the old one.

Leopard works fine just so long as nothing happens to confuse it. If something happens it just deletes all the data and does not copy it to the new drive.

Karpik has lots of videos and code of the problem in hand. Other people have posted to his bog that they have encountered the same problem. One person said that this flaw first appeared in Panther version of the operating system but the Iphone-obsessed Apple could not be bothered fixing it. µ

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Comments
I've previously reported this too!

I think this is a long standing bug. I've previously reported this myself for a "so what" response at Apple Developer meetings.

MacOS X Finder's move & copy is stupid anyway. There's no way to resume an interrupted move or copy unlike Windows.

posted by : Pete, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
Move? Try copy + delete

It is generally a bad idea to "move" over a network, and not only with "Leopard", "tiger" or even "kitty" ;).

What you are basically asking you OS is to put the data onto a shared device over network, and while it is doing that, to delete the data as it is copied.. but you still demand performance!! 
So the OS puts in cache the files and then tries to do as much as it can in memory..
If the networked device fails, you WILL lose something, normally what is already in cache (this happens with windows Xp & 2000 & to a lesser extent, linux). 
As I get it, with leopard you will lose everything that is selected.. this is an important bug if true, but is a bug that will only happen to those that are very brave or ignorant...

posted by : aitor, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
Move is Copy and Delete

To the poster above me...
It seems that they are not confirming the data has been stored on the drive.. Most likely they are copying to a ram cache, confirming that the file exists in ramcache then deleteing. When the process then tries to copy and delete from ramcache, the operation fails and because the source data had already been confirmed and copied from disc the original disc data is now deleted. and I say most likely because I give apple some credit and assume that they are at least confirming the first copy. 
At some point, ram probably gets purged, or the copy doesn't confirm from ram.

Windows to my knowledge does not do this - it confirms to the intended destination (not cache) before removing the data from disk. Safer but slower.

posted by : thegiz, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
No surprise in Apple's response then

"the bug will only happen to those that are very brave or ignorant"

None of that around here, now is there ?
So this is a non-issue, right ?
Right.

posted by : Pascal Monett, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
This is not the case in xp

aitor said;

"this happens with windows Xp & 2000 & to a lesser extent, linux). "

This is just wrong and a statement caused by a people who does not really know windows but try to say something about.
- Aka "Fanboy" -

Go to explorer in Windows, say "edit/undo move/undo delete" and there is no data loss.

Its just not fact that OS-X is perfect and windows is crap. You just want to make people believe this.

- I'm no Windows-Fanboy
- I'm no Mac-Fanboy
- I'm no Linux-Fanboy.

It doesn't interest me a rat ass what OS you use, but i really don't like it if some fanboys lie to make their OS perfect (or other OS crappy).

This is just a serious bug in the OS-X nothing other, linux has bugs, windows has bugs, software has bugs.
Humans do bugs, regardless what they do and where they work at.
--> maybe this is no bug, and the data can be recovered, like in windows.

It's just good to know that this can happen, i don't blame Apple for that, its fine to know (better than not knowing this bug). So i can, as the other user mentioned, do a copy and delete, not a move until the bug is fixed, or a workaround is there.

Only Fan boys blame other system, and i don't like this behavior.

Just me

Cis

posted by : Cisjokey, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
Now you've done it!

Watch yourself INQ. The Defenders of Apple (AKA The DOF) will be here soon enough to point out that this is not Apple's problem.

You do not understand the pain and complexity involved in coding something similar to:

If file (not =) to filecopied
then restore (previous location)
end if

Something like this is completely impossible in a modern OS like the all holy and powerful Feline. Quiet down now, this is NOT the Fruit's fault!

posted by : Dan Asti, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
But.

Not to defend apple perse, but would not that new 'timemachine' thing (aka removal of 'delete') allow restoration of the lost stuff?

posted by : W.-, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
Move? Try copy + delete = apple fanboy?

Lol, this is the ultimate apple fanboy comment.

posted by : zebow, 06 November 2007 Complain about this comment
WHT?!

I never heard of a cut and paste function that doesn't verify that the file/files/object being moved before deleting the original file.

That is the most POS coding job ever!

Tell me again why ppl like Mac OS?

posted by : Bruno Dieter Chan, 07 November 2007 Complain about this comment
quiet down

why are you guys arguing about the new features in os 10?

posted by : missingxtension, 07 November 2007 Complain about this comment
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