---
title: "Winner of \"Our OS is even more stupid\" award"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2007/11/25/winner-of-quotour-os-is-even-more-stupidquot-award.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2007/11/25/winner-of-quotour-os-is-even-more-stupidquot-award.html"
published: "2007-11-25T18:23:39"
updated: "2007-11-25T18:23:39"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "This one wins my \"Stupidest OS Design of the year award, and it's not even Vista related. it's actual Mac OS Related. yep! \"Perhaps the most troublesome of the problems has been a data loss issue caused by Finder, which…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Winner of "Our OS is even more stupid" award

By Roy Osherove November 25, 2007

**Historical article** · Originally published November 25, 2007; technical details may be outdated.

[This one](http://www.tomsguide.com/us/2007/11/22/more_leopard_problems_plague_apple/) wins my "Stupidest OS Design of the year award, and it's not even Vista related. it's actual Mac OS Related. yep!

> "Perhaps the most troublesome of the problems has been a data loss issue caused by Finder, which performs a function on Macs similar to that of Explorer in Windows. In Leopard, when Finder moves a file from one drive to another, **it deletes the file from the originating hard drive, without first checking to see if the file arrived safely on the destination hard drive**. If anything goes wrong during the file transfer, such as a momentary power glitch on the destination hard drive, the file would then be destroyed on both hard drives."

Lovely.

**Update**: To all those who think this issue was fixed - here's the quote from the article:

> "Leopard users hoped that a free maintenance update (OSX 10.5.1), released on Thursday, November 15, would fix the issue, but Apple's [statement accompanying the update](http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907) is too vague to give a definitive answer. With regard to data loss, it states that "... a potential data loss issue when moving files across **partitions** ..." has been fixed, but moving files across hard drives is not addressed. Personally, I wouldn't want to bet my important data on that statement."


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

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### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/