Odd Save-And-Move OS Bug

/ 28 April 2007

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed an issue with certain apps in the OS and Finder.app where you save a file to one location on your boot disk, then without closing the file move the file from its initial save location to another location on your boot disk. When you go and save the file again it saves the file back into the original save location and leaves the one you moved alone. You then don’t notice that this has happened and worry that you’ve lost your whole document the next time you open it. A Spotlight search would reveal both copies but usually you’d be too panicked to think of performing a simple Spotlight search. This is the kind of bug that I think has Finder.app written all over it because really we only see our files from within Finder and never can use other methods normally. TextEdit.app is the application that I’ve had this issue with the most. It seems like it may be a simple little fix in the source code of Finder.app but I doubt that Apple will fix this bug for 10.5.x.

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