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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I wish I only lost mail data in the upgrade to Catalina.

I lost 400GB of data when the installer repartitioned the hard drive and the files that were in folders in root went bye bye.

I know I'm not supposed to put stuff there, but it was a family video project I was putting together for my wife for Christmas, and she would have seen it anywhere else.

There should have at least been a notice or a warning or some kind of confirmation. But there was nothing.

Nothing in the "Relocated" folder, either.

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If you can reproduce this (I suggest using a VM, they're perfect for this sort of thing), it would be great to write it up as an article and get more visibility on it, because removing files that it did not put there is a really really serious bug.

Microsoft suspended an update after reports of data loss, and was still severely chatised for doing it (explicitly deleting files it did not create without asking permission first): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

I'm a long-time Windows user, have put files in the roots of drives (maybe this is not such a common thing for Mac users to do, but nonetheless the OS should not assume...), and have never had any OS upgrade remove them. It would be interesting to see what, if anything, Apple will do in response.

Check /Users/Shared/Relocated\ Items/Security/

The Mojave installer just up and trashed my whole file system. No reason to believe it can’t happen again. Always backup.

Damn. Thanks for sharing. I hope you had something on a backup somewhere

Did you backup before you upgraded?

Just so I clearly understand, if I have a lot of files and directories in say /repositories or /projects and go to upgrade, there’s a chance I won’t have that any more because I mistakenly treated it like any other *nix filesystem? That’s... not disconcerting in the least.

Don't you have to disable SIP to be able to put files there?

In Mojave, I didn't. I don't recall it even asking for an administrator's password, though it was seven months ago when I created the directories.

sorry to be harsh, but you have only yourself to blame.

1. you know not to put stuff in root. you must have disabled SIP to do this? WHY?

2. ever heard of backups? it is SO easy in mac os.

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