Chronic catastrophic data loss with Lion & servers

CT wrote:

That's just rookie behavior.

charlie

It may or may not be "rookie behaviour" but even if it is - don't you know that rookies sometimes use computers?

AmericiumDreamDocuments wrote:

the thing to worry about with Versioning and Auto-save

No. There is nothing to worry about. These complaints are no different than when people complained about taking away the beloved and reliable floppy disk.

CT wrote:

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

It would also be nice if Apple had provided a PowerPC compatibility layer so that all PowerPC applications would still run on Intel. After all, what could go wrong? People would switch to native applications eventually wouldn't they?

What a rookie.

CT wrote:

What a rookie.

I'm sure you feel all high and mighty calling someone a rookie but you are missing the point(s). What I heard is this:

1. Previous to Lion, a user had to take an action (i.e., Save) to change what was stored on the server. With Lion, changes get stored automatically even if you didn't mean them to be. With everyone ingrained in the age-old "open document, play with it, don't save it" method versus "open, duplicate, play with duplicate" method, someone is bound to mess up. While the system was far from foolproof before Lion, the Lion way makes it almost a sure thing that inadvertent changes will get saved.
2. Lion is supposed to keep prior versions. It is apparently not doing this on the server. An inadvertent change will wipe out the previous version. I can't test this assertion about versions not being saved but that is what was stated as part of the issue.

There are plenty of systems out there not using versioning controls and they were working just fine before, even if they were not foolproof. Going by what has been stated as the problem, Lion will wreak havoc on them.

All of these Lion disaster scenarios require both a carefully constructed hypothetical sequence of events and the absence of a number of Lion features specifically designed to keep that from happening. In fact, the only way to achieve these disaster scenarios would be if Apple actually had made many of these features optional.

No they don't - autosave can lead to data loss when used on:

*SD / USB cards

*non AFS mounted shares (e.g. Samba shares to our linux servers)

it basically jeopordises data intergity for a significant proportion of users and requires a data handling metaphor that is less convenient than today's non-autosave system.

It might work well in a single-user, Mac only environment. That does not, however, reflect the real world.

You see, that is the problem with a carefully constructed scenario. If you don't construct it just right, it all falls apart.

No one has ever claimed that Lion Server behaves any differently Snow Leopard Server (or Windows or Solaris for that matter) in this regard. Let's assume you meant Lion client instead.

Furthermore, just quitting an application does not close the document. When you re-open the application and decide you don't like those changes after all, you can use Versions to restore the previous version. Even if the file system you are using does not support Versions, Lion still maintains local versions of a document until you close it. At that point, it will warn you that you will lose your versions. For the sake of argument, let's assume this is a new Lion user who ignores those warnings.

What "original data" are you talking about? You just copied it to the server. You had to have copied it from somewhere. That version is unchanged. In a real world scenario, a file on the server would be locked and the user would be forced to manually unlock or create a duplicate.

Of course, your suggestion to use Lion Server is a good one. If all of your files were backed up with Time Machine on the server, the most you could never lose the original data.

Ah! "The whole system is broken and doesn't work" That's what I'm talking about. Enough of these poorly researched points that can be easily refuted - let's just rant!

In my experience, the pop-up warning pops up if you hit the close button on the document. I have never seen it fail to appear when the close button is pressed. This is acceptable.

In my experience, closing an application such as Pages when there is an open document will save your work to the server and keep a local copy of the versioning. In Pages you may see "saving" pop up for a moment. In Preview there is a pause but nothing that says "saving". The copy on the server is altered. Not good.

The "save" operation is going away. That's a fact of life. It was a foreign operation created because if the limitations of past technology. Those limitations are gone. Any writable file on a ever can be changed at any time using any type of client. You don't need Lion to do that. If you have files you don't want to change, you need to make them read only.