OS X Finder Bug Eats Your Data
Moving files from one place to another seems like a relatively benign thing to do, but Mac users could find their data mysteriously disappearing if they’re not careful. Tom Karpik, a computer science student at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, has uncovered a particularly nasty bug in Apple’s OS X that could result in massive data loss should your file move operation be interrupted.
The issue revolves around moving data from one drive to another. If there’s a connection problem during the move, your data won’t be transferred (as you would expect), but worse, OS X will go ahead and delete the original data as if the move had been successful.
Initially Karpik reported that the bug was with Leopard’s new Finder, however, an update to his original post says this bug goes back as far as OS X 10.3 Panther.
Part of the reason most Mac users remain blissfully unaware of this problem is that the default behavior for moving files between source and destination is to simply copy them over. However, if you for some reason need to move the files (which mimics copying, except that the source is removed after a successful copy) rather than copy them, you would hold down the CMD key while you drag-and-drop, which is when this bug crops up.
The bug has obviously bitten a number of people, based on comments posted to Karpik’s original entry and elsewhere. And the problem seems to affect just about any kind of backup drive — local USB, local Firewire, SMB and more.
There’s a movie of the bug in action, which can be found here.
Obviously if you’re moving a small text file there’s probably nothing to worry about, but if you’re moving that iMovie masterpiece that weighs in at 2 GB the odds of something going wrong (power failure, network connection loss, etc) dramatically increase.
It’s unclear whether Apple is aware of the bug, but one thing’s for sure, there’s no known fix. Given that the behavior of moving files (copy to source then delete original) is essentially the same as copying files followed by a delete action, we recommend you copy and then manually delete to avoid any data loss.
[via CNet]
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