Lasse

Just to recap: around December 6th, some kind of faulty update or
modification was introduced on some of the central Foldershare servers. This
caused the automatic deletion of files with names containing non ASCII
characters from users libraries.

The number of users affected will probably never be known (or made public
anyway), but my personal guess is it must be at least in the thousands,
potentially many more. Many of these, especially from countries that are not
too dependent on UNICODE, will probably never notice that 'random' files are
gone. Until they need them off course.

The bug was apparently fixed and users where notified. There was some talk
of possible help for affected users, such as a script to restore files or a
list of characters affected. Since then, nothing has been heard from the
Foldershare team.


I think we deserve a better response and follow up to this problem!


First of all, what happened to the list of characters that the "test team is
working on generating" like Mohammed wrote on the 10th?

Second and more important, what is the exact nature of this bug and what is
MS doing to prevent a similar situation from recurring?
Or put differently: am I the only one who feel kind of ambivalent about
letting Foldershare handle my data without a proper explanation?

The way something like this is handled is of importance to all FS users who
trust MS software with their data safely, not just the ones affected by this
particular bug.

Now, I know this is a free service etc.., and as such I guess (without
knowing jack about law) that MS cannot be held liable for loss of data, which
is besides the point anyway. But either this situation must be handled
professionally or FS should ship with a loud and clear warning that the
software is used at own risk etc.., i.e. freeware style. Just sticking a
little red "beta" sign besides the name doesn't mean that MS can produce bugs
that cause great loss of user data and then pretend like nothing happened.

One possibility: I noticed that the EULA on the FS frontpage still refers to
ByteTaxi (?!?!) and can't help wondering if that is why MS apparently doesn't
really fell any kind of responsibility…. ;-)

Lasse

PS. Yes I know files where "only" moved to the trash, but for the unaware
user this is probably the same as permanent deletion. Surely, a general
Windows bug that moved files to the recycle bin would be considered extremely
serious even though the files are not permanently deleted right away.