nine-tenths of bookmarks inexplicably vanished

Hosiah · 08-01-2006, 09:40 AM

I know this one's going to be a stumper for most of you, but I'll post it here as a lesson to others...

Running Mandriva 10.1, I never got Firefox 1.5 going on it so I settled for Firefox 1.0.7. I logged off last night, woke this morning, started Firefox, and discovered the bottom nine-tenths of my bookmarks disappeared.

Every other file on the system seems fine. The bookmarks.bak in my .mozilla/firefox/[usernumber]/ folder shows the same date, time, and number of bytes as my bookmarks.html. fsck reports no disk errors. I had no backups, but can assure that nobody had access to the system.

The file isn't just missing data, but seems to have had it's data truncated. That is, I had folders nested within folders, and the trailing few that shoul have been nested three deep in in the main section instead.

So it went from (example):

Code:

[begin-folder]
   data
   [begin-folder]
      data
      [begin-folder]
         data
      [end-folder]
   [end-folder]
[end-folder]

to:

Code:

[begin-folder]
   data
   [begin-folder]
      data
...

Since I both maintain a website and work freelance web-design online, many of these bookmarks were work-related, and I've now lost touch with client information, resources and info, reference pages and more I can't even remember.

Can anybody even explain how this could possibly have happened? We are having a lightening storm this morning, but there was no evidence of power-failure, and if it spiked we do have surge-protectors. But if there was some kind of general failure while Mandriva was running it's usual system-maintenance routines overnight, could that have done it? We have DSL internet through a router with all ports closed, and even if it was malicious I never heard of such a specific attack.
I cannot find another file anywhere under anybody's login that was touched otherwise.

macemoneta · 08-01-2006, 12:09 PM

This is a known, but low incidence, bug in Firefox.

Hosiah · 08-01-2006, 08:50 PM

*groan* have a link to the specifics of it? I've seen tons of bugs reported on the Windows platform, but then what *isn't* buggy on the Windows platform?

This is a shock. In seven years of steady Linux usage, this is the first time I have ever lost a single byte of data. One time I was even coding in Emacs during a power-strike blackout that was strong enough to weld two of the plugs in our household into their sockets, and when I brought it back up, found the auto-save buffer intact without having to re-type a character!

I'll consider this lesson-learned. For those looking for a preventative measure: I have started a new cron job as root in /etc/cron.daily which is a shell script which rotates a seven-day backup of my bookmarks file. Quite easy to do, example code:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_6 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_7
cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_5 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_6
cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_4 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_5
cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_3 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_4
cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_2 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_3
cp /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_1 /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_2
cp /home/USER/.mozilla/firefox/log_string.default/bookmarks.html /root/USER_bookmark_backup/bookmarks_copy_1

exit 0

So it doesn't error, I started things off by creating the directory folder and copying my, uh, new bookmarks file to the directory with seven copies respectively.

...since my /home and /root are on different drives, this ensures that even a disk failure won't wipe out this file (this can be done the same way for any important file, btw). I'll file this under "Gee, I wish I'd thought of it before!"

Learn from my mistake, folks, or you may end up

!

Garlictoast · 08-02-2006, 12:09 AM

This is no doubt a Firefox problem. Firefox 1.5 is beta or alpha, I think. See the Mozilla bugzilla area and search for missing/lost data problems. www.mozilla.org

The data in Windows\Application Data\Mozilla and the data in /home/username/.mozilla are nearly identical. I've run Mozilla in Linux using my Windows data.

Under .mozilla, there's a profiles folder, profile-name folders, a something.slt folder for each profile-name folder, and then your main set of user data including bookmarks, logon/password file, etc. You should back up all of this stuff periodically if you value it.

Under the main folder of data is your default mail folder that could have a huge amount of data. If it's too much for your backup media, you can move it to a custom location like /home/username/mozilla-mail and set your mail/news settings to point to it. This of course is for Mozilla and Seamonkey, not Firefox which doesn't do mail.

Anyway, you can back your ../.mozilla data up to disk, burn it to a CD or DVD, or tape if you trust it. Programs can mess up, lightning can strike, disk-drive chips can burn out. Back it up!

macemoneta · 08-02-2006, 09:12 AM

This bug describes the issue. While it was originally thought to be a problem only on Windows, as you read through it you will find that it is not platform specific. It's been reported many times, but the root cause has never been found. Reported in 0.9.1, still present in 1.5.x.

Bugs happen; that's why there's backup software.

Helmut_K · 08-02-2006, 09:44 AM

Hosiah,
I'm running the same kind of software, and previous problems with all kinds of software lead me to constructing a sound security concept. You need one to suit your exact requirement too! You might need to buy some hardware, maybe a second hard drive or a USB stick, but that's nothing compared to the aggravation it may save you from. My personal concept looks like this:

Drive one:
Hda1 (Win C) for XP, hda5 (Win D) for the mirror (image) of my almost unused XP, hda6 a common partition in FAT32, readable and writeable both from Win and mdk.

Drive two:
hdb1 is /
hdb6 a second common FAT32 partition, being the back-up of the other common partition on the other hard drive.
hdb7 /usr

My data routinely goes to the common partition on the first drive. This entire partition regularly gets backed-up onto the other common partition being on the second hard drive. If one drive blows up, my data is always secured on the other.
Every now and then this is back-up onto an external media. It can be a USB-stick or a CD-RW, or whatever. Main thing it is outside of your box. If the box gets stolen or blows up, at least you keep your data.

Now the safe storage-media is taken care of, the next thing is to decide what you want to back-up. My backup always includes simple things such as the address book, Firefox bookmarks, emails, pics, written documents (OpenOffice stuff) and so on.
Since I have been using Linux, nothing has been lost.

Good luck,
Helmut