Finally, the truth comes out! Apple has finally acknowledged the nasty iBook disk corruption bug, which has apparently been present in every iBook to roll off the line since day one. As far as bugs go, this is one of the more serious in Apple's checkered history; afflicted systems can't boot up, instead displaying the dreaded flashing folder icon indicating that no boot device was found. iBook disks found fried in this fashion generally prove to be irreparable no matter how many disk repair utilities are thrown at them, which means we're talking about that ugliest of situations, irretrievable data loss. This is an especially heinous scenario with the iBook, since it's a consumer device, so it's targeted at folks that generally think "backing up" involves shifting into reverse and looking through the rear window. And remember, the iBook ships with absolutely no capacity for backup, lacking any sort of removable storage system-- even a lowly floppy drive. So when this bug bites, odds are, any data on that disk has gone to the Great Trash Icon in the Sky.

Now, the reason there's a mini-scandal buzzing about this whole thing is that, given the iBook's "Backup? What backup?" design, any potential for data loss is a Big Deal™. Yet despite the Mac community having noticed months ago the iBook's alarming propensity to eat data for breakfast, Apple's kept its collective mouth shut about the problem for what seemed to be an eternity. When Apple did make an official move, all we got was a call for profile reports asking for help in isolating the problem, when in fact a big honkin' notice on the iBook Support Page explaining the importance of backups may have been a good idea. Worse yet, it's been weeks since people noticed a connection between turning on the "Preserve memory contents on sleep" option in the Energy Saver control panel and watching their data get shredded like a phone book into a wood chipper-- yet there was still no warning from Apple.

Now Apple's finally admitted to the problem in a Tech Info article; apparently the problem occurs when, in "rare circumstances" involving low available memory, an iBook (or a new PowerBook with FireWire) with the "Preserve contents" option enabled is put to sleep. The contents of RAM get written to the hard disk, all right-- unfortunately, they can be written right over some "critical file system information." Whoa Nelly! Yeah, that's a big bug. Heck, that's the Bug That Ate Cleveland. And yet there's still no huge flashing warning on the iBook Support Page telling users to turn off the "Preserve contents" option, or risk seeing their data melt like a vinyl record on a car dashboard in July. Go figure. In any event, Apple promises a software fix later this month that will make the "Preserve contents" feature work as intended; until then, hopefully iBook and new PowerBook owners will hear about the problem (from someone) and take steps to avoid it.