813479 - Firefox Sync scrambling bookmarks and folders

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[marty]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20121024073032

Steps to reproduce:

Add new PC, Android, or IOS device for syncing to desktop pc. Sync option set to Merge.


Actual results:

Hundreds of carefully organized foldered and subfoldered business bookmarks were either scrambled or moved to unsorted. Some folders moved to unsorted had bookmarks intact, many were emptied, with bookmarks grouped together.
Adding another device repeats the problem.


Expected results:

Folders, subfoldes and other bookmarks should have kept their hierarchy intact during sync with other devices.

Comment 1

[Chris Kolosiwsky [:ckolos] (ckolos has left the building)]

WONTFIX'ing for cleanup. Re-open if this is still (somehow) an issue after all this time...

Comment 2

[marty]

Hi,
Thank you for swinging back around to this.

I have not attempted to sync bookmarks since reporting the bug, too risky.
Is there good reason to believe that the problem is actually resolved?

I would want to backup the bookmarks on each device first. If it went wrong, I'd have to delete all the bookmarks on all the sync'd devices and import each device's original list.
Does that sound correct?

Thanks

Comment 3

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

8 years ago

Yikes, I'm sorry this sat for 8 years without a response.

There have been significant improvements to the robustness of bookmark syncing in the meantime, so I think it's probably worth trying again.

I would want to backup the bookmarks on each device first. If it went wrong,
I'd have to delete all the bookmarks on all the sync'd devices and import each device's original list.

This sounds like it would be a good layer of protection if the sync still doesn't work, yes.

If you do try again and it doesn't produce the result you want, please visit about:sync-log to find log files that might help us diagnose what went wrong.

Comment 4

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to marty from comment #2)

I would want to backup the bookmarks on each device first. If it went wrong, I'd have to delete all the bookmarks on all the sync'd devices and import each device's original list.
Does that sound correct?

Just to follow up from what Ryan said, there's also been significant improvements in backing up bookmarks. In your profile directory, there's now a "bookmarkbackups" folder which contains recent, automatically created backups of your bookmarks - eg, when you first enable bookmark syncing, a new one will automatically be created. If you need to restore, these are automatically offered.

However, as you say, it's probably prudent to manually create a backup that you can restore from, if for no better reason then peace of mind.

Restoring bookmarks from a backup automatically deletes existing ones - importing doesn't, but import and restore are distinct operations. Further, if you perform the restore while Sync is still connected, you should find things "just work" on the other devices (ie, all the bookmarks which were deleted from this device as part of restoring will also be removed from the other devices, etc) - although if you are forced to do that again, I suspect you will not want to be keeping sync connected regardless.

Comment 5

[marty]

Thank you both. I see the new backup /restore features.
If I recall correctly, part of the original problem was the high number of bookmarks to sync. While the Bookmarks system does not provide a count that I can find, I would say that my combined desktop business & personal count is at least 10,000.

Do you think this number will be an issue for the sync system or for mobile devices?

Practically speaking, not all bookmark folders would be needed across all devices. Could there be a way to designate which bookmarks and/or folders to make available for syncing?

Thank s again!

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

10,000 is a lot of bookmarks! There are a few things that will cause issues with that many:

• Many in a single folder: sync will get upset if there are "too many" in one folder - how many depends on various things, but if they are organized into a number of folders you are likely to be OK, but many thousand in a single folder might cause problems - although the problems here should not cause corruption, just a failure to sync due to hitting server-side limits.

• If you are running Firefox for Android or iOS, you are probably going to have a bad time. The new Firefox for Android ("Firefox Preview") will probably work OK though. Sadly, Firefox for Android is knows to still have some corruption issues (which also don't exist on "Firefox Preview")

But otherwise, it's likely to work, even if it takes many minutes to complete. The logs in about:sync-log will let us know why it failed if indeed it does.

Thanks for your patience, and if you choose to go ahead, good luck :)

Comment 7

[marty]

Also good to know.
Yes, the bookmarks are highly organized in multi-layer folders.
I'll try the Android Preview version of Firefox. Is that the same as the Beta version?

Comment 8

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

I'll try the Android Preview version of Firefox. Is that the same as the Beta version?

Yes. (Until very recently, "Firefox Preview" was different to "Firefox Beta", but I believe the mobile team have just recently finished an effort to merge the two channels and if you install Firefox Beta from the appstore, you'll get the version that Mark is talking about above).