Leopard and I had a good day yesterday... well, until I turned my back on it for a moment and it sunk its teeth into my hindquarters. Here's how:

The transition from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been one of the most trying experiences of my Mac life... and I've been using Macs on and off since 1990, so that's saying something. Finally though yesterday Leopard and I started to get along. It ran quickly and smoothly at work, I even managed to install some third-party updates in my lunch hour and got them all to work fine.

But then last night something bad happened. Really, really bad. First I installed an update for SpanningSync which enables two-way syncing with Google Calendar. That done I then installed a Leopard-ready version of Intego Virus Barrier, and fired up its associated NetUpdate program to grab the latest virus definition from the web.

Now my laughingly-named broadband connection was running more slowly than usual, but NetUpdate actually appeared to hang. What happened next I'm a little fuzzy on - I was tired after a long day. I think I did a Force Quit on NetUpdate, but then I got a spinning Beachball of Death. I rebooted my Mac and logged into my account and then waited... and waited... and waited.

Where's the Finder?

The beachball continued to spin, I couldn't click on anything in the Finder. So I rebooted again. And again. Same problem. I then logged into another Admin account which worked perfectly. I took a peek inside my original account folder only to see a gaping black hole staring right back at me. Where had all my stuff gone? Surely Leopard can't have crapped all over my FileVaulted account?

[FileVault, in case you don't know, is Apple's 128-bit encryption technology for protecting your files from unwanted gaze. I've used it on my Mac laptops for years to stop some scumbag from hoiking my ID should I lose or have my laptop stolen.]

My stuff was gone - all the stuff I've written for magazines and websites over the years, all my work-related pictures, thousands of emails, website passwords. Extinct.

Backups right?

I had a quick peek inside my wife's user account as well. That was also FileVaulted. That was also dead.

Now normally none of this would matter a bit as, of course, I (ir)regularly back all my stuff up on to an external hard drive. That was the case until yesterday at work when it formatted the hard drive so I could try out Time Machine.

No user accounts. No backups. You can imagine how many expletives spewed from my mouth in the next, what, one, two hours.

Thankfully I haven't lost absolutely everything. I can still remember my name and my birthday, and my habit of synchronising some stuff to my .Mac account still means I have some emails, the contents of my address book and my Yojimbo backup. Phew.

Gone, Daddy, Gone

And somewhere on my other Mac I still have some of my old work stuff so I can relive the days when I worked as a jobbing reporter on Practical Caravan (don't ask).

But the articles I've written in the last three years? Gone. It's a good job I now work in online, isn't it?

Of course what's happened is my FileFault. I should have backed up my backup. But Apple should also take some share of the blame for its flakiest update to Mac OS X yet.

Now I know what it feels like to have a Leopard bite me in the ass.

NB: Spanning Sync on Leopard also seems to have done something awful to my Google Calendar. It no longer exists.