You didn't want that anyway

The following story is fairly representative of what’s been going on for me in general over the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re a web developer, who uses a mac for all your development work. Let’s also say that, to simplify deployment to your live server, which stores its web files in the /home/httpd/ directory, you’ve configured your mac to also use /home/httpd for all your web files. Finally, let’s round out this hypothetical by saying you want to upgrade your OS to Leopard.

What you’ll discover in this situation is that Leopard wants to use the /home directory for itself. It doesn’t seem to want to use it for anything; apparently it just likes to have it there, empty. So during the installation process it quietly erases everything you may have had sitting there.

Nifty, eh?

You’ll also discover that your latest backup isn’t quite as recent as you thought it was, because they never are.

I don’t mean to whine, but there’ve been a few situations recently that mirror that little story way too closely for comfort.