Apple

Here’s an interesting Snow Leopard bug. It turns out that a number of Mac users have found that their home folders have disappeared after logging in, on their Macs, with the Guest account. (The Guest account is a special account, activated in the Accounts preferences, whereby a user can log in with no password, and, at log-out, all their data is deleted. It’s great for one-time logins.) This has happened to people who turned on the Guest account option under Leopard; there’s something wrong with the way Snow Leopard transfers this setting to the new version of the OS. It turns out that the data is not actually lost, but can be recovered. CNet reports that there’s a way to get this data back.

The procedure is a bit complicated, and requires messing around with some of the more advanced settings in the Accounts preferences. While this is certainly feasible, it’s best to take preventive measures: if you’ve got the Guest account set up, disable it and re-enable it. (We’d recommend disabling the account, rebooting, then enabling, just to be safe.)

Of course, you should always make sure that you’ve got a current backup of your home folder, and any other important documents. You should also have a clone of your startup volume, just in case you have any serious problems, so you can instantly boot your Mac from your clone. You can do this, naturally, with Intego Personal Backup, which, in addition to performing backups and clones, can also synchronize folders, and can perform all its operations automatically, according to schedules you set up.