Regardless of OS it's always a good idea to have backups of your important data.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/19/apfs-bug-macos-data-los...
[2] https://www.iezzi.ch/leopard-1051-massive-data-loss-bug/
From the articles you linked:
"The images get corrupted on copies to the USB attached external drive. "
"However, as Bombich notes, ordinary APFS volumes like SSD startup disks are not affected by the problem described above, so the vast majority of users won't be affected by it – the flaw is most applicable when making backups to network volumes. "
I am not sure you have read the original article and the two articles you linked, otherwise it would have been obvious that these are not the same by volume and severity.
If users don't have backups, any unintended data loss caused by an operating system bug is bad because it can be difficult or impossible to recover the affected data. Would you not agree?
You may not have been affected by the two bugs I described above, but some people would have been (more so with the image corruption bug).
> the described bug has not happened as a result of an upgrade, it was not forced on any user and definitely was not affecting the whole desktop.
If you go back further in time, there actually was a bug that resulted in data loss during an OS X upgrade.
https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/exclusive-oxford-semi-fi...
Oxford Semiconductor has issued a statement with regard to the emerging Panther and FireWire data-loss debacle.
The company says: "Oxford Semiconductor has been investigating reports that some FireWire 800 drives have lost data after an upgrade to the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther operating system is installed (released late October).
"Currently we believe this issue relates to a change in the way Panther uses FireWire that affected version 1.02 of the OXUF922 driver software. A new version, 1.05 was issued by Oxford Semiconductor to the manufacturers of external drive products in early September."
As Macworld UK first reported yesterday, users installing Panther while having an external FireWire drive connected to their Mac have seen data loss; similarly, users with FireWire drives connected to their systems have seen data loss once they reboot Panther. At this stage, it appears that the problem is confined to FireWire 800 drives.
In 2001 there was also a bug in iTunes 2 that caused an entire hard drive partition to be deleted if the volume label was prefixed with a space.
https://www.wired.com/2001/11/glitch-in-itunes-deletes-drive...
Some Macintosh users who rushed to download the latest version of iTunes – Apple's popular digital-music player – were singing a song of woe on Friday. A bug in the installation procedure caused the application to completely delete their computers' hard drives.
The bug seems to have affected computers with a very specific configuration: people running Mac OS X who had "partitioned" big hard drives into several smaller ones, and who'd typed a space at the beginning of the drive name.
For example, if a Mac had a drive named " music" instead of "music," it might have been deleted by iTunes.
Tom Fisher, a computer repair technician who lost about 100 gigabytes of information during the installation, said that people often include a space in the drive name to ensure it shows up at the top of the list when they examine their drives.
According to Mac experts who examined the code of the buggy iTunes installer, the problem arose from a very tiny programming mistake – a forgotten quote mark.
Sometimes it's recoverable from blindly pasting god-knows-what from stackoverflow. Most of the time I just have to do a complete reinstall.
(I guess it's not a complete brick on update because I have never suffered data loss, but it's similarly infuriating)
It's also nowhere near as bad as actually loosing data, as you mentioned.
I have also been using linux for over a decade and I still can't recommend it to any non-developers friends unless their hardware build is extremely common.
I am currently running two nvidia gtx 1080 SLI and multiple 4k monitors. Even for just installing the OS, I need to physically remove both graphic cards and use a smaller monitor first. This physically laborious workaround just to reinstall the damn thing is what amplified my rage when it decided to break on autoupdate.
Funny, I use a Macbook pro at work, and windows at home. I'm not the kind of person that has strong preferences on tech, I use stuff until it stops working well and then I switch.
My several (over time) work macbooks have been really bad. OSX has so many bugs, many of them seem really serious potential security issues (graphical corruption across processes, login screen flickering to the desktop upon waking from sleep, ...). Lots of other bugs are just annoying and make things janky to use. It also does weird things that make me fear it is a fire hazard (e.g. battery draining within 24 hours while the lid is closed in my laptop bag).
On the other hand, a windows small form factor connected to my TV, and a surface pro have been basically hassle free. Obviously windows has bugs too, but none of the ones I've seen make me question security the way I do on OSX.
OSX has its share of dirty bugs but nothing out of the norm. You could entrust me your surface pro, and I’ll make it crash randomly with only legit pro software.
Next thing I knew I was on throttled internet for 3 weeks. Setting all the machines so that they don't update turned out to not be too hard, but was FAR harder than it needed to be. I'll decide when my equipment updates.
Delivery Optimization: https://www.howtogeek.com/224981/how-to-stop-windows-10-from...
And there's ways to set the Ethernet connection as metered if you search a little bit online.
One study says nearly 7% of all internet users in the US use a satellite connection. These are slow, and almost always metered. That is a lot of people getting surprise hammering of their connection.
You can cache iOS device updates with this mechanism as well. I’ve never bothered as I’m fortunate not to worry about metered bandwidth, but it seems like a nice feature if it works as advertised.
idea that no sane user could possibly have anything more critical in their life than installing whatever code comes out
The problem is when you examine user behavior, they inexplicably seem to have something more critical than installing updates, 24/7/365. Which is how bot farms begin.
I'm not sure users have been finding the alternative that has been playing out any more acceptable. Does it look that way to you?
Now, do you have the right to own and drive this autonomous car around on public roads, if you’ve modified the car to be an “open server” where anyone can anonymously connect to it from anywhere on the Internet and drive it around?
And, if not, then what’s the difference between that modification, and knowingly driving the car when it has an unpatched vulnerability allowing people to do the same?
And if you find that there is no difference, then what’s the difference between a vulnerable car that can DDoS physical infrastructure, and a vulnerable PC that can DDoS virtual infrastructure?
MS could deliver security updates separately to feature changes but chooses not to. The Tragedy of the Commons is that well-publicised incidents like this (and the trend of updates to consumer software, supposedly under the guise of enhancing security, to bring about significant changes in appearance and behaviour) make people less, not more, inclined to defer updates to all software with the result that developers feel the urge to strong-arm users into updating.
The only justifiable reason for updates to be forced in the example with the vehicle is the physical danger that could otherwise result, and that simply doesn't exist in the example with the home computer. To my mind, the line of thinking you are engaging in here is a perfect example of the rampant authoritarianism that seems to be so rife in the computer security community these days.
How about if there not only was no FDA approval process for the vaccines, but the pharma company itself didn't bother testing them?
Because that's Windows Update in a nutshell. Every couple of months somebody breaks into my house in the middle of the night, even though I locked my doors and windows and posted a no-trespassing sign, and pokes me with a needle... and I'm supposed to just sit there and take it in the name of "security."
Imagine what the FDA already does, and then imagine that they were verifying a drug that would be given to every person in the country. There'd be a crazy strenuous verification system for that.
And that's a big part of the problem. Not only is there no 'FDA' to test these patches -- nor should there be -- but the manufacturer evidently doesn't test them either. They fired their QA personnel a few years ago, so that's now our (unpaid) job as users.
Even worse, there are some indications that this particular bug was discovered and reported by insider program members and actively ignored by the company.
Windows Update is apparently the team where Microsoft employs their B- and C-level players and managers. That's not OK. If you're going to insert yourself forcefully into everyone's critical path, you'd better know what you're doing.
Besides, if you look at what sorts of vulnerabilities they're actually patching, the majority of them require local access anyway; remotely-exploitable-by-default ones (fortunately) tend to be few and far between.
They mover force an update but make you aware you're on an older version.
I'm much happier in a world where only those that put in the effort to research how to block updates and then go through the steps can do so. They are much more likely to encounter info on how they should really think about what they are doing, and whether there are alternatives or partial solutions that achieve most their needs without being as extreme.
Please don't ruin the little bit of herd immunity we've built up.
At any rate, iCloud is not “backup” in the traditional sense, it’s really “cloud sync” for user data. In that context it’s not really surprising that connecting a new device to iCloud and restoring pulls the newer OS version, given you never really backed up the OS data at any point.
When I was _forced_ into the windows 10 update, it went through the process and appeared to finish but didn't put my desktop back. No problem I figured, they put it somewhere.
So I did a file search, found the desktop in a folder, moved it back to the desktop.
A day later it self-restarted and _completed the update_, replacing the desktop with the now empty desktop folder.
I went to the Microsoft store to get them to do a file recovery and they had the _gall_ to tell me it would be $250 plus 7 days and they wouldn't guarantee recovery.
I moved to Mac this year after being exclusively on Windows since '98.
I hope Microsoft dies andisgraceful death.