Closed Bug 230032 Opened 21 years ago Closed 15 years ago

Profile completely overwritten including passwords and bookmarks

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

x86
Linux
defect
Not set
critical

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: paco, Assigned: p_ch)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031225 Firebird/0.7 StumbleUpon/1.89
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031225 Firebird/0.7 StumbleUpon/1.89

Simply, I started mozilla-firebird 0.7 and my bookmarks lost. I've looked on the
.mozilla and .mozilla-firebird dirs trying to locate de files, but the files are
empty. Then i search making a grep string, and nothing. The files are empty in
all users. Finally i tried to scan all disk for a backup searching exact
strings. Nothing again. I've lost bookmarks with this browser (mozilla-like) for
4 years, and this is the last time. I stop using.

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
I think the user used for this session has been destroyed and overwrited by
mozilla. I lost TOO all passwords in my passwd database and all user relative data.
Summary: Another time, LOST BOOKMARKS (4 years of losing bookmarks) → Another time, LOST BOOKMARKS, LOST USER, LOST PASSWORDS (4 years of losing bookmarks)
so you're saying a new profile overwrote the existing profile?  any steps to
reproduce?  this can happen if certain files get corrupted/deleted in the
profile, and why profile backup tools do exist.
Summary: Another time, LOST BOOKMARKS, LOST USER, LOST PASSWORDS (4 years of losing bookmarks) → Profile completely overwritten including passwords and bookmarks
it's strange but i managed to reproduce this bug several time ...
it seem to be random i have two machines one on windows xp and one on windows 2k
pro both seem to be affected. Aldo the bug seem to manifest randomly it's most
likely appening on mozilla crash or on unclean exit (aka killed) but it can
manifest anytime.  
this just happened to me, Im going to mark this new, as well
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Travis, do you have steps to reproduce?  Also, are you sure this isn't the
change in profile directories?  Third, can you post a build ID when confirming?
(In reply to comment #5)
> Travis, do you have steps to reproduce?  Also, are you sure this isn't the
> change in profile directories?  Third, can you post a build ID when
> confirming?

FYI, this just happened to me.

I previously had a February build (Windows install)...I just now ran the 
20040316 Windows install and it blew away my passwords, bookmarks and history.

Windows 2000 Professional, SP3.

Every time I reinstall, it overwrites the information.
This has happend to me two timesunder win XP.

Most recently when Win XP crashed and I was using firefox 0.8

During the crash the CPU usage was 100%, probably due to interaction
between firefox and antivirus program (panda platinum 7.0)
Easy to reproduce, I backed up my mozilla directory to a zip file, and when
i tried to move it to another PC (with my bookmarks) as soon as I ran the
damn program it imported the IE favorites and overwrote ALL my old book marks.
Lost them all... 4 months of research bookmarks gone. Very unhappy.
I deleted the original backup zip file before running the program.
er, did you zip the mozilla or firefox directory?  and is that the program or 
the profile directory?  the importing of IE favourites should only happen once, 
so if you properly copied your profile (not the program dir) then you must have 
done something wrong for the import to happen.  This is a hidden folder on 
Windows so you might have missed it completely.
Happened to me last night.  Running W2K.  Mine happened when I simply closed
Firefox.  Something happened to windows and I got the "blue screen of death",
computer restarted.  when it started back up, bookmarks were gone.  Very bad
thing.  I was a huge Firefox fan until this happened.  Lots of research gone bye
bye.  This really sucks.   I say bye bye Firefox.
that's not this profile corruption, that's the bookmarks file getting corrupted.

backups are recommended for any software version < 1.0

there is a bug for backup bookmark file that should be fixed before 1.0
I'm running into this on Mac OS X now...  100% reproducible every time I
install.  However, whatever I'm hitting got broken some time in the week
following 20030513, as the 0513 build works fine and doesn't corrupt my profile,
so I'm not sure if this is the same bug...
I've had this problem 6 times or so in the last few months. I have the problem
on Windows XP Home and with Linux (Xandros). I upgraded to 0.9.3 to try and fix
the problem, but no luck. I also run Firefox at work, on Windows XP pro, but
I've had NO problems there. I can only think of two things that are different:
1) I have a folder of bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar, and 2) I have a large
number of bookmarks at home (84 Kb worth). If someone could fix this,(and
alphabetize bookmarks like Mozilla) this browser would be close to perfection.
:-)  Good Luck!
This just occured for the first time while updating firefox from 0.10 to 0.10.1
using firefox's updater (running on Debian testing). I did "sudo firefox" in
order to update, and closed my previous session of firefox I was running as
non-root user after the dialog asked which profile I would like to use (since
default was in use).  I chose default after closing the previous session, and
had all of my bookmarks available.  I ran the updater without any problems and
closed firefox.  Upon restarting as normal user, my bookmarks were empty.  I
checked both bookmarks.html and bookmarks.bak, found ownership and group had
both been changed to root, and both were empty.  Also, user.js and user.bak had
similarly been changed to root ownership/group.
that's known.

Running sudo firefox is not recommended as it executes like root in the user's
path/homedir.

Users needing to run something as root using su should do the following:

"su -" (enters su mode with the root path/home dir)
firefox
exit

iirc, that particular bug was WONTFIXed a fair bit of time ago.
I have experienced this problem twice now. Both times I have shut down FireFox
normally, and then closed Windows normally. (Windows XP sp1 the first time, sp2
the second time). Upon reboot, all bookmarks are simply gone! The second time,
my home page was even reset to FireFox, as if it was a new install, but all of
my extensions and plugins were intact. 
Other than this problem FireFox it great. With it, however, FireFox is almost
useless! I am reluctant to use it as my main browser, because I am tired of
loosing important bookmarks, and I will be very reluctant to recommend it to
anyone until this is fixed
Same thing happened to me only yesterday (0.8 on WinXP). I tried restarting the
pc from various system restore points but to no avail. Added several new
bookmarks, but when I turned on pc this morning they'd all disappeared too.
bookmarks.html is empty.
driving me crazy.
I used to be big fan of Mozilla and thought there was nothing wrong with it
until I decided to change my startpage and lost my bookmarks :( 

I use Win98 and Mozilla 1.7.3 and had a file called startpage.html on my
desktop. In this file I store a lot of links and recently decided to take it off
my desktop because of the cluttered icons and put it in a directory..... I did
this while I had Mozilla open. Changed my startpage to point to the new place
where I put it... Browsed some more and decided to close Mozilla (repeat
"close"! It did not crash!) 

Then all of a sudden I see on my desktop (where I used to have statpage.html
originally) a brand new file called bookmarks.html which was never there! I
check the timestamp of that and was created just a few minutes ago when I moved
my startpage.html and set Mozilla to point to its new place. My bookmarks in the
bookmarks menu where gone! Fortunately for me the damage is not TOO big (I had
some research-related URLs like others) but the annoyance is BIG! What if I had
say 100 bookmarks collected over a period of months? I should be carefull about
this now coz I am using Mozilla both at home and at work. 

I am sorry Mozilla developers out there but this is quite serious! Take a deep
look into it. 


Keep up the good work! IE sucks!
No older folders found in %appdata% for old bookmark file... looks like its
completely gone!! searched all of c - local hd -- nothing found but empty
default bookmark files. chk'd my old phoenix dir's in %appdata% too - nothing
there either..   was using firefox 0.8 before upgrading - release notes stated
that this was an auto import of old prefs and bookmarks... i had 100's of
passwords, and 1000's of bookmarks..... i knew i should have backed it up but i
trusted your release notes.... 

steps to reproduce?  install mozilla.... open it ... bye bye prefs and bookmarks... 

win xp sp1 
(In reply to comment #3)
> it's strange but i managed to reproduce this bug several time ...
> it seem to be random i have two machines one on windows xp and one on windows 2k
> pro both seem to be affected. Aldo the bug seem to manifest randomly it's most
> likely appening on mozilla crash or on unclean exit (aka killed) but it can
> manifest anytime.  

I have had a similar problem trying to upgrade from version 1.0 Pre Release to
version 1.0 final release.  Win2K Advanced Server, SP4, single user, no server
functions running.  Problem has occured with each version of the final, up to
the current version available at this time (1.03).  An install dissappears my
bookmarks and userid/passwords.  Even leaving the final install selections
checked making your website for Firefox my home page only brings up a blank
page, even though my original home page url's are listed in the General Options.
 Invoking the Home page brings up the Firefox home page dispite the General
Options settings.  Re-installing 1.0 Pre Release restores everything, so I'm
stuck with using the Pre Release for the time being.  This is the first problem
I've ever had with Firefos, so I haven't given up yet.  I have duplicated this 4
times.
I am using:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

And I just encountered this problem.  Firefox was open and my machine froze for
an unrelated reason (printing from MS Word caused the machine to freeze while
firefox was open in the background).  When I turned the machine off and booted
it up again, Firefox had lost most, but not all, of my bookmarks.  It had also
lost almost all of my profile data including, as far as I can tell, all of my
passwords.

This has happened before, but in the past it has simply lost all of the
bookmarks and profile data, instead of just most of it.  This time, much of the
appearance information (i.e. content of the menu bar) was preserved for some
reason.  I can't reproduce this problem, it seems to happen more or less at
random, but it's VERY ANNOYING!
sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change
QA Contact: mconnor → bookmarks
users used to be able to save bookmarks in html format then import them into upgraded versions. What happens now is not working.
i can't see how we could handle this bug today, too much time is passed (original reports were 2004) and too much code has changed to have any useful information here. We also manage bookmarks through Places now.

I'm marking as incomplete because i can't see if it would make more sense to say wontfix (what?) or invalid, we simply don't have informations useful for fixing it today.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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