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Home folder lost - user account restored to default

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.

All apps are still available - they are on a different partition with the OS.

The partition where my home folder lives is now virtually empty. I used stellar pheonix to try to recover the files from my home folder, but it did not find them as lost not as deleted files. It gave me the option of recovering about 40GB of deleted files, but they were legitimately deleted files.

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

MacBookPro5,1

Posted on Sep 3, 2009 12:11 PM

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95 replies

Sep 3, 2009 10:27 PM in response to Topher Kessler

It's not in the /Users directory, and the size of the drive has changed. It's as though SL has treated my home folder as a guest account, and deleted it.

My Home folder was not on the same partition as the system files. I think I moved it to a different partition in 10.4.

Now I have a /Users directory in the system partition, and another /Users directory in my data partition.

Sep 3, 2009 11:40 PM in response to NewYorkYogi

So I am using Time Machine - my home folder (except the exceptions) is there.

Looking through TM I found something interesting, which gives further weight to my suspicion that this is related to the guest account. A day before the crash there was no Guest account folder in the /Users directory. Just prior to the crash a Guest account folder appeared in the /Users directory on my start-up disk (not the partition my home folder is stored on). Post crash that Guest folder has disappeared again. _I have NOT used the guest account since installing SL._

Sep 4, 2009 4:14 AM in response to dubaidan

The Guest account is created by default.
Did you "check the /Users folder to see if the missing home directory is present and simply renamed"?

EDIT: Sorry, that already been answered...
I think your best bet at this point would be to reinstall Snow and only choose your Documents to Migrate + Apps, if you have any third party.


User uploaded file
-mj

Message was edited by: macjack

Sep 5, 2009 7:08 AM in response to tcnsdca

After Dubaidan and tcnsdca I am the third person in this thread who has experienced this 'wipe home directory' bug. I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard last week. By accident I clicked on the 'guest login' icon on my MBP thirty minutes ago. After about 1 minute it automatically returned to the login screen, without showing up the guest desktop, so I decided to click on the 'guest login' again. This went pretty smooth and when I logged out the message appeared that all the 'guest login data' wouldn't be saved, but returned to normal.
When logging in to my regular account everything was gone. I don't use filevault. Nothing has been renamed to something else. My home-directory still exists under /Users/username but it is just empty.
Apple should have noticed this bug report already. It doesn't feel right that Apple doesn't take immediate measures when someone reports such a bug with a high potential data loss.
I would suggest to everyone to disable the guest login option IMMEDIATELY until Apple has addressed this. I hope that Apple will come up with a swift response and a nice gesture to victims of this bug.

Home folder lost - user account restored to default

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