Guest Account Bug Resets User Accounts and Deletes Files on Snow Leopard

Question

Hi Everyone
Well basically, I hadn't used my Guest Account since upgrading to snow leopard, and I accidentaly clicked it instead of my user account this morning, to find that when I logged into my normal account ALL my files, settings, mail etc had been reset.
So I'm posting this to let people know, (and hopefully Apple if they don't know about this) what's happening.
Here's the post I sent to Apple Feedback:
Hi,
Well basically, I upgraded to snow leopard recently, everything was working fine, I've upgraded to 10.6.1 and have all the latest software updates etc, so anyway this morning I turned my computer on and accidentaly clicked on the Guest Account on the login screen instead of my normal one, so it started trying to load the guest account (which I hadn't loaded since before the upgrade).
So I wait about two minutes, and nothing atall happens apart from it loading on the logon page, so I pressed Enter to return me to the login window.
So once I was returned I logged on as my normal user, to find my Desktop reset, my Dock reset, my Documents, Music and Photos reset and all my software reset.
So I restarted my computer and logged on again, it was exactly the same, everything gone. At which point I looked in the Users folder to find that my User profile had been removed and replaced with a fresh one with the same name. So I then spent half an hour restoring everything from my Time Machine backup.
I hope Apple are aware of this issue and would greatly appreciate to hear back on the status of what's happening about it, as it doesn't seem to be an isolated issue it's been happening to other people over the last month.
Here's a few posts from other people who've had this problem, and an article on the CNET site MacFixIt about the bug:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10123656#10123656
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2157518&start=15&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2171494&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2142272&start=30&tstart=0
Reports on the Internet:
http://9to5mac.com/snowleopards_eatusers
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346974-263.htmll?tag=mncol;txt
To clarify, I have an iMac (aluminium 20" one), with a 2.4ghz processor and 3GB of Ram, please update me on anything that's going on with this issue as I don't want it to continue happening to others who might not have backups,
Thanks,
Daniel.
So if anybody else expieriences this issue your not alone, there's a couple of other posts from people who've had problems above in the middle of my feedback letter. Unfortunately in my case it deleted my Home folder and replaced it with a new one, so if this happens to you then your only option is to restore from a backup. You can attempt to use file recovery software if you don't have one, but I haven't tried this and don't know how well it would work.
Hope I've helped clarify things for anybody who this has happened to,
Daniel.
Message was edited by: dbferrari

Answer 1

Maybe it will be usefull but last days I tried to login as *Guest* (because I didn't want to logout as my user). In *system preferences* I allowed guest login, then I fast switched to *Guest Account*, do some changes in profile like mouse movement and so on, then I correctly logged out and logged once more to my account. Now I affraid off rebooting macbook (I always hybernate system with changed default settings which store memory into HDD) until the fix will be released. Probably the data was not removed, because I was logged in as me and */Users/$USER* was still in use. Now I am wondering if I can reboot safelly macbook without losing my data..
For backup do I need to use some command for backuping home to windows machine through *SMB*? because unix like systems have links and so on.. (in *AIX OS* I have to use "*rsync*" command, which copy whole data exactly as it is stored on filesystem - if there is link it will copy only that link, not file which is linked...)