Data Deleted after Guest Account Log-in in Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard guest account allows other users to log in to your account without actually letting them to access or edit your data. When the guest user logs out, any system changes and settings it performed are cleared out and thus leaves your system safe and sound. Snow Leopard users have discovered a peculiar bug due to which their home directories get deleted after they log in the guest account. To solve problems, one of the practical solutions is to restore lost files and folders from backup However, when backup proves to be unproductive as it is damaged or not completely updated, you should use a third-party File Recovery Mac product.

To exemplify, consider the following scenario:


You use a Snow Leopard based system with a regular account 'A' and a guest account 'B'

You select guest account 'B' at log-in screen and log out without any issue

You log-in your regular account 'A' and observe that data of your directories is deleted, though the home directory exists. You might also observe the account 'A' is set to default

Cause

There can be several possible reasons causing this problem:

Bugs in Snow Leopard for guest account

Snow Leopard is incompatible with how guest account was enabled initially. This could happen if you have upgraded to Snow Leopard and the guest account was enabled in earlier OS X operating system and is being used without any changes. An incompatible setting might cause the issue

Your guest account is corrupted

Solution

To check if incompatible setting is the issue, you can try toggling the guest account settings through Account system preferences. However, to solve the existing problem of data loss, you can follow these steps:

Restore data from the latest Time Machine or other backup

Disable or remove the guest account using Account system preferences. You can also create a new account without any administrative rights and then configure it with parental controls.

In case of unavailability of valid data backup, you should immediately use an effective Data Recovery Mac application. These are special purposed tools designed to use powerful scanning algorithms to provide safe and comprehensive File Recovery Mac.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is an advanced data recovery application that provides safe and comprehensive recovery of lost, deleted or missing data. It supports Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.3.9 Panther operating systems. It is a non-destructive Mac File Recovery utility compatible with HFS, HFSX, HFS+, HFS Wrapper and FAT file systems.