Apple is a company that has been known to pay very close attention to the details, but in recent years it seems like that is no longer the case, no thanks to an increasing number of buggy software releases. Apple only just released an update that fixed a bug that could crash devices with a single character, but that’s not all.
In a blog post by developer Mike Bombich (via MacRumors), it seems that he has recently stumbled across a new bug that affects macOS, a bug that has the potential to cause data loss when writing to disk images. This affects Apple’s APFS system and was discovered due to Bombich’s work with “sparse” disk images, which for those unfamiliar is a file that macOS mounts onto the desktop and treats it as if it were a physically attached drive.
This is typically used in backups and disk cloning operations, which is what Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner does which is how he stumbled across it. According to Bombich, he traced the bug back to macOS’s background “diskimages-helper” service which he has since reported to Apple, but it is unclear if Apple responded and if they already knew about the issue.
Now the good news is that while the term “data loss” might seem scary, Bombich notes that ordinary APFS volumes your Mac computer’s SSD startup disks are not affected by the problem he discovered. This means that unless you’re making backups to network volumes, this shouldn’t impact you at all, but hopefully Apple has plans to release a fix soon.
Filed in . Read more about macOS.