Chronic catastrophic data loss with Lion & servers

Thus, we did not experience "unintended changes" all the time, nor was it luck.

Take a look at your keyboard. Notice how close together the W and S keys are? If none of your users ever hit one when meaning to hit the other, you've been very lucky indeed.

you are right... if you push command w instead of s then the window is closed instead of data saved. I know there's the auto save function with Lion, but that is still annoying.

And what if you press command-S when you mean command-W?

If you used Mac server with a native filesystem you wouldn't have this problem. Such a file system would support versions. You could also run Time Machine on the server that would preserve all versions of all documents. Both would be really handy things to have.

You can lock any file at any time. You can write a script to go through and lock all files if you want.

While Photoshop and Office will probably support Autosave one day, it isn't going to be any time soon. Apple Preview and TextEdit really aren't collaboration tools. Photoshop and Word are.

I don't think you have anything to worry about.

OK. I've played around with it a bit more and learned a couple of things.

In Lion, you aren't supposed to close documents until you are completely done with them. Quitting the application without manually closing the document does not fully close the document. You will have all the versions of the file, on any file system, until you manually close the document. If the file system where the file resides does not support versions (neither a USB FAT Flash nor AFP from my 10.6.8 Machine do), you will get a warning message that you are about to lose old versions. If you just do File > Quit, unmount the server, and reconnect after a month vacation, all of your versions will still be there.

This is a significant change that we will all have to get used to. I don't see how it is going to lead to catastrohpic data loss.

Your concern about your backups was that you aren't using Time Machine on the server and if a change goes undetected, you could lose the good version. Using Time Machine on your server should prevent that. No, Time Machine doesn't do every second, but it does do every hour. Your chances of losing a file forever are pretty slim.

I still think there is nothing to worry about. If you are really worried about it, you can still run a script to manually lock every shared file and keep locking them as they are created. That would give the users an extra hoop to jump through.

This explains another common scenario:

http://www.blueboxmoon.com/wordpress/?p=281

Now everyone can come up with a bunch of excuses and work-arounds, but suffice to say those are ridiculous to *require* users to change their behaviour.

Consider my workplace - running on Linux (servers & desktops) for more than 10 years. 10-20 employees. I think we've had to get out a backup due to user error induced file loss about 3 times in the past decade. We don't normally lock our files, we just tend to be conciensious during our work.

Increasingly we've been buying Macs, but there are a lot of things that Apple doesn't cater for - certain types of workstations suitable for compiling VHDL for large FPGAs being one of them.

There is no way that we are changing our well running servers over to OS X - after all Apple kills legacy support frequently and it doesnt serve our needs (or can OS X natively run Agilent ADS, Zuken CR-5000 and similar 100k+ USD software systems?), so people saying "run Time Machine" is not acceptable to *many* environments.

The biggest danger is insidious data loss - a few things were changed - a quick test of some new number in a spreadsheet to get some different filter coefficients and bam... autosave.

Doesnt matter if "Lock file after x amount of time" was on, because there is always a time period in which the file if vulnerable, and there is no warning that the changes have been saved.

As an added downside - the autosave sends a lot of data back across WAN links - leading to beachballing when accessing files over VPN.

Now, for the consumer the whole Versions and Autosave might be a good idea. In a heterogenous environment it's a data loss that's waiting to happen - and one that's not necessarily easy to detect.

Apple should really have given use a switch - even if this is default on, to stop this behaviour, it's as simple as that. BS about "Apple is showing us the future" - some of us have work to do in the present.

PS. The arguement about not switching is specious - the newer Macbook airs, etc *only* support Lion - no downgrade possible.

Azathoth101 wrote:

Consider my workplace - running on Linux (servers & desktops) for more than 10 years.

I'm sorry to hear that. I find Linux still has many years to go until reaches the stability of MacOS X or even Solaris circa 1997.

I think we've had to get out a backup due to user error induced file loss about 3 times in the past decade.

Your experience is not typcial.

there are a lot of things that Apple doesn't cater for - certain types of workstations suitable for compiling VHDL for large FPGAs being one of them... can OS X natively run Agilent ADS, Zuken CR-5000 and similar 100k+ USD software systems?

Can it? Absolutely! Those packages you listed run on both Linux and Solaris. They could be ported to MacOS X very quickly. Perhaps you should ask them to do so.

so people saying "run Time Machine" is not acceptable to *many* environments.

Sure it is.

The biggest danger is insidious data loss - a few things were changed - a quick test of some new number in a spreadsheet to get some different filter coefficients and bam... autosave.

Doesnt matter if "Lock file after x amount of time" was on, because there is always a time period in which the file if vulnerable, and there is no warning that the changes have been saved.

You've got to hand it to Apple. Only with the mass hysteria that surrounds Apple would features like Time Machine, Versions, and Autosave be equated with "data loss". Talk about your reality distortion fields!

there are a lot of things that Apple doesn't cater for - certain types of workstations suitable for compiling VHDL for large FPGAs being one of them... can OS X natively run Agilent ADS, Zuken CR-5000 and similar 100k+ USD software systems?

Can it? Absolutely! Those packages you listed run on both Linux and Solaris. They could be ported to MacOS X very quickly. Perhaps you should ask them to do so.

You clearly have no idea of what you are talking about. But yes, I'll just ask Zuken nicely to recompile for OS X (it's just copy and paste into Xcode, right?) - or perhaps they can release their source code to the Macports group so I can build it myself?

You've got to hand it to Apple. Only with the mass hysteria that surrounds Apple would features like Time Machine, Versions, and Autosave be equated with "data loss". Talk about your reality distortion fields!

Concrete examples were given of data loss.

All that would be required to resolve this to most people's satisfaction is a System Preferences setting.

Azathoth101 wrote:

You clearly have no idea of what you are talking about.

Mais si ! I've been porting Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux code to MacOS X (and even MacOS) for many years. Anything that already runs on Linux and Solaris can likely be ported to MacOS X quite easily.

But yes, I'll just ask Zuken nicely to recompile for OS X (it's just copy and paste into Xcode, right?)

No, it's much easier than that 🙂

All that would be required to resolve this to most people's satisfaction is a System Preferences setting.

Much more is required than that. Versions and Autosave are low-level parts of the MacOS X document-saving infrastructure. They would have to re-write the API to make the feature optional.

. so, from what I understand of this conversation,

the thing to worry about with Versioning and Auto-save

is that not even Apple's own apps

are correctly using these new features:

. what each supporting app needs to do is

handle this for user:

when the user asks for a server file,

it's doing the copy to local without being asked to,

and then on a save instruction,

it both saves and copies back to the server .

. does that sound right?

Azathoth101 wrote:

The biggest danger is insidious data loss - a few things were changed - a quick test of some new number in a spreadsheet to get some different filter coefficients and bam... autosave.

Yes - that's crazy. Everyone uses spreadsheets to try things out by changing some of the input data to see what would happen. That is kind of what spreadsheets are for !

This plus the ridiculous autosave of images when edited in Preview must surely point towards Apple reviewing the Autosave feature, or risk losing a large number of users.

In the meantime, to get around the issue, I would recommend using MS Word for spreadsheets (so far, MS Office doesn't have Autosave and if/when it does, I am assuming MS will do it in a sensible way. Or you could use Office 2008, which works fine in Lion).

By "a sensible way" I mean what Graphic Converter has done. The latest Lion version of GC has Autosave off by default and you can turn it on if you want to. So for basic editing/cropping of images, GC is a much better option than Preview.

THe trouble is that if you have (say) 20 people accessing your image files from the server and playing around with them, you can't tell them not to use Preview. 😟

Yes, it would be nice if applications were written so that auto-save was a configurable option.

Yes, anybody who takes important/critical documents, e.g., spreadsheets, images, etc., and just starts tinkering with them to experiment instead of making a copy and then tinkering, is just plain dumb - autosave or not. That's just rookie behavior.

charlie