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Apple has admitted that its latest operating system Snow Leopard harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer’s owner.

The problem occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard – which was released at the end of August – log into a “guest” account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory – such as documents, music and videos – have been deleted.

Reports of the problem first reported by CNet more than a month ago, but it was only on Monday that Apple finally responded by recognising that there was a problem for some customers.

“We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix,” said the company in a statement.

One of the customer reports in the Apple discussion forum, “I had the guest account enabled on my MBP – I accidentally clicked on that when I went to log in. It took a few minutes to log in then after I had logged out of that account and back into mine my enter home directory had been wiped. All of doc, musics, etc gone.”

Another user raises two issues with the Snow Leopard — Home folder lost – user account restored to default.  He states:

I installed SL last weekend, no major problems but many annoying bugs. This morning when I woke up the computer had hung – screen saver was frozen. I held down the power key to shutdown. Turned the computer back on, clicked on my user account icon, and it was like I’d just picked up a new computer… my home folder had been replaced with a “straight out of the box” home folder. Standard desktop, standard dock, nothing in my documents folder, standard library. My entire home folder is gone.

I have repaired the disk – no problems. Any suggestions would be appreciated…

Problem and Analysis

This is a serious issue, and worse it has come soon after rival Microsoft’s admitted that a problem with its own backup systems had left tens of thousands of American mobile phone customers stranded without access to their data.

Customers who had subscribed to use T-Mobile’s Sidekick handset, which uses software produced by Microsoft subsidiary Danger, were told that they would not be able to recover any of their personal information – including phone numbers, photographs or messages, after the company failed to properly back up user information.

These incidents prove that customers cannot depend entirely to these large corporation’s software. They need to think of their own data back-up mechanism.