Thanks for the info Sam. Good luck on the recovery. You're the man for the job. What are you doing with Marmite & Sister while out with your client?? regards Tony
On 24 August 2011 10:16, Sam - MacAmbulance <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All > My client has just suffered an extremely bad case of data loss caused by > Parallels Tools, serious enough for me to warn you all in the hope that you > never get caught out by it. > A client of his emailed him a powerpoint presentation and, for whatever > reason, the filename consisted only of a single dot (I can hear the UNIX > geeks beginning to cry now). He dragged the attachment to his desktop and it > crashed Windows Explorer. He dragged the attachment to his OS X desktop and > again the machine crashed. He restarted to find that his entire Desktop > folder had been wiped. Unfortunately for him he had several hundred GB of > files on his Desktop, including his Parallels Virtual Machine file (don't > ask!). > For the uninitiated, every folder on a Mac has two invisible files within > it. A file with two dots as the name ".." and a file with one dot ".", two > dots denotes the parent folder, a single dot denotes 'this folder'. By > dragging an item with a single dot into a folder, you essentially replace > 'this folder' with the contents of the single dot file. > Quite why his client named the file just "." is beyond me; How his computer > allowed him to do so is another thing entirely. As an average user, my > client would've had absolutely no idea of the importance of the . and .. > files, so would never know the consequences of replacing them. It's only > lucky the file wasn't named ".." or he would've lost his entire home folder, > replacing the parent folder of Desktop! > The really important question is why didn't Parallels Tools warn him of the > impending replacement of the folder he was dragging this file into? I tried > to replicate the bug in Outlook 2011 for Mac, saving the "." attachment to a > folder on the freshly wiped Desktop, I was warned "this will replace the > folder 'test', are you sure you want to do this". > I haven't tried it with VMWare Fusion so not sure if it's purely a bug > transferring the files between operating systems. It's also a fairly obscure > situation as I've never seen anyone able to name a file simply "." in all my > years of being a nerd. > Unfortunately, in this case, my client's Parallels Virtual Machine file was > over 100GB, so we had excluded it from Time Machine to keep from filling up > the backup drive (with semi-regular manual backups to a different disk, not > done by the client since Nov 2010). Ironically his Time Machine backup had > also been complaining about free space and had been unable to back up for > over a month (which he informed me of only this morning). > So, it's off I go to attempt to recover anything i can from the deleted > space on the drive, then recover from his Time Machine backup and restore > his copy of Windows from a year ago. > MacBook Pro > OS X 10.6.8 > Parallels 6 latest build as of last week > 500GB hard drive > What a difference a dot makes………………… > Sam > > MacAmbulance > > Providing affordable Apple & PC services > > Sam Mullen > 07747 778022 > http://www.macambulance.co.uk > [email protected] > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Sussex Mac User Group" group. > To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB.
