I use Apple's .Mac iDisk syncing feature to store some commonly accessed files locally and have them automatically sent to Apple's servers as a backup. Today, on a whim, I decided it was time to change my password and did so through the .Mac web interface. I then tried to access my iDisk in the Finder, and of course, the password was wrong so the access was denied. I opened the .Mac System Preference pane where it showed me an error message stating that my password was invalid, so I clicked the "Sign Out" button and then signed back in with the new password.
A naïve user wouldn't expect this to cause any problems, however signing out appears to have deleted the locally cached copy of my iDisk! It also forced me to reset all of my .Mac settings including which items are synced, and then re-downloaded the entire iDisk contents to the local disk. All I can say, is it's a good thing the iDisk had just finished it's last automatic sync before I changed my password, otherwise I could easily lost a lot of data! It would have been nice to have some sort of a warning when signing out of .Mac that the local iDisk contents would be lost.
So consider this as a warning to others; be careful how you go about changing your password and make sure to sync your iDisk first if you use syncing at all. For those of you that just access your iDisk over the network and don't sync to the local disk, this shouldn't be an issue.
Addendum: Turns out that the previous local iDisk was saved to my desktop as "Previous local iDisk for username.sparsebundle." This removes the previously mentioned concerns about data loss, but it still would have been a hassle to merge the freshly re-downloaded iDisk and the old one had they been different.
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