We have been following this issue for the last couple of days, but now we can actually confirm that it is a real issue. It seems that if you are running Apple Snow Leopard 10.6 on your Mac you could find yourself in a strange situation where home folders are being automatically deleted by the OS.

The problem seems to occur when you use the Snow Leopard “Guest” account login feature. It seems that if you access a user home folder in this way with the first wrong click it puts the OS in a mode where it deletes all of the account data in that folder. It appears that it only gets worse, as in some situations you can actually find yourself in a mode where the OS will wipe out all of the actual user’s account folders and data.

From what we have been able to sniff out it seems that Apple is aware of the problem (and we don’t know how they could not be aware of the issue) as strange reports of this have been circulating since September. There are a lot of theories as to why this is happening, but Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the issue publicly.

Based on what we know the only way to prevent the problem is to disable the Guest account and then later re-enable it. This seems to create a fresh Guest account and in this manner problem does not seem to happen. According to some in the know, they believe that the problem is most prevalent from those that upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard. We have to also suggest that it might be a good idea to back these folders up so you could restore them, if necessary.

No one currently has any clue if and when Apple intends to address the problem, but our guess is that they will have to acknowledge it and do something soon. We don’t expect them to allow this kind of situation to stand now that it is hitting the more mainstream media.