Data loss bug discovered in Leopard

By: Paul Mah

A blogger has discovered a data loss glitch in Apple’s recently released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This bug could result in

the loss of data when moving files from a Mac to or from any external drives. The medium could range from a local USB

flash drive, SMB file share, or even a network attached storage.

Excerpt from The Register:
According to Tom Karpik, the bug manifests itself when an attempt to move - rather than copy - a folder from the Mac is

interrupted. Moving a folder off a disk essentially involves first copying it then deleting the original. Karpik shows

that Finder fails to ensure that the folder has been successfully written to the target disk before removing the original.

Like Windows, Mac OS X defaults to copying if source and destination are not from the same drive. In fact, to perform a

“move” on the Mac, the user will specifically need to hold down the Command key. Bearing this in mind, most users will

probably do a copy followed by a manual delete of the source files.

Still, nothing like having the bug hit when performing some heavy-duty migration to spoilt you entire week. To spice it up

some, this bug apparently goes all the way back to Panther.

So Mac-fans, just stick to the “copy then delete” routine for now eh.