MidnightJava
Registered
When it happened once, I just figured stuff happens. But now it happened again a week or so later, and I need to figure out what's going on.
A week or so ago, my user settings were completely wiped out. It's my wife's computer, and she doesn't think she did anything out of the ordinary. Repair permissions didn't help. Fortunately I have a bootable backup, thanks to CC Cloner. Booting from the backup, user settings were fine. So I restored the disk from backup, and all was well.
But now it's happened again. It happens that my wife has been not working lately, so I know for sure she didn't do anything to make this happen. Other than checking e-mail now and then, she hasn't trouched the computer for days. But suddenly this morning all her settings are wiped out.
Both times it was discovered in the morning. So I'm wondering if some batch
job is the culprit. I have CC CLoner set to do backup every day at 3:00 AM, but the problem doesn't happen every day, more like every 10 days or so. To the best of my recollection the first occurrence was Monday 21 Aug. I discovered it again today, Wed 30 Aug. I guess it's possible it occured Monday this week and we didn't notice it because of inactivity on the Mac.
But I don't have any chron jobs running weekly. Software Update runs weekly (don't know what day- the UI doesn't indicate), but it's set to get my permission for installing any updates. According to the Software Update UI, the last update was performed 2 Aug. This is acccording to the curent corrupted system and the non-corrupted system on the backup disk. Both system instances also tell me that software update checked this morning, but didn't find any updates. The timing does seem to implicate Software Update (since the failure occured on the day the weekly update check was made), but if nothing was updated, what could be the problem?
I'm at a complete loss as to what on earth is going on here. Does nayone have any ideas what might be wiping out my user settings or what I could do to try to figure it out?
I'm running OSX 10.3.9 with latest patches on a Mac Mini.
A week or so ago, my user settings were completely wiped out. It's my wife's computer, and she doesn't think she did anything out of the ordinary. Repair permissions didn't help. Fortunately I have a bootable backup, thanks to CC Cloner. Booting from the backup, user settings were fine. So I restored the disk from backup, and all was well.
But now it's happened again. It happens that my wife has been not working lately, so I know for sure she didn't do anything to make this happen. Other than checking e-mail now and then, she hasn't trouched the computer for days. But suddenly this morning all her settings are wiped out.
Both times it was discovered in the morning. So I'm wondering if some batch
job is the culprit. I have CC CLoner set to do backup every day at 3:00 AM, but the problem doesn't happen every day, more like every 10 days or so. To the best of my recollection the first occurrence was Monday 21 Aug. I discovered it again today, Wed 30 Aug. I guess it's possible it occured Monday this week and we didn't notice it because of inactivity on the Mac.
But I don't have any chron jobs running weekly. Software Update runs weekly (don't know what day- the UI doesn't indicate), but it's set to get my permission for installing any updates. According to the Software Update UI, the last update was performed 2 Aug. This is acccording to the curent corrupted system and the non-corrupted system on the backup disk. Both system instances also tell me that software update checked this morning, but didn't find any updates. The timing does seem to implicate Software Update (since the failure occured on the day the weekly update check was made), but if nothing was updated, what could be the problem?
I'm at a complete loss as to what on earth is going on here. Does nayone have any ideas what might be wiping out my user settings or what I could do to try to figure it out?
I'm running OSX 10.3.9 with latest patches on a Mac Mini.