101307 - Browser hang and bookmark corruption

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 87864

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Description

[Aaron Sherman]

I'm not sure if my crash is related to 70174, but I've been running 2001091903
under 98 and I "add bookmark"ed and then immediately "manage bookmarks"ed. The
browser hung (no redraws for 10 sec), so I killed it and went back in. My
bookmark list was now much shorter, and if I tried to decend into the list
(pull-down bookmarks, follow folders) it would hang the browser, and my bookmark
list would get shorter. I'm attaching the final list. My fix was to give up and
move the bookmarks asside.

The only thing that WAS strange about my bookmarks is that I had a folder that
contained a folder of the same name "Technical" because I had only 1/2
reconciled my import from long ago of my Netscape4 bookmarks.

Comment 1

[Aaron Sherman]

Attachment: Broken bookmarks file

Comment 2

[Mike Young]

I've seen this before. I'm prety sure its either been reported, or is known about.
What happens is that at some point, mozilla gets stuck in a loop in one of the
subfolders of bookmarks. The "hang" is mozilla writing your bookmarks file over
and over again." it never gets out of that subfolder, so all bookmarks lower on
the list are lost. This is the way bookmarks seem to always get corrupted in
mozilla.

I'm not sure what to do about this bug. It really isn't something we can fix
because there is no way to reproduce it. Effectively, the bug is: "When Mozilla
corrupts my bookmarks it should corrupt them nicely"

If that is the case, this bug should be marked a dup of the bug involving
backups of critical files.

Comment 3

[Aaron Sherman]

Well, in that case, it sounds like the bookmark writing code needs some error
checking that recognizes such loops and aborts. A backup file should be kept for
such emergencies.

That's not ideal, but if the bug cannot be found... well, it certainly will get
under a user's skin (it did with me, I had years worth of bookmarks).

Question: is this still "UNCONFIRMED", given that others have seen it?

Comment 4

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Paul Chen is now taking Bookmarks bugs. For your convenience, you can filter 
email notifications caused by this by searching for 'ilikegoats'.

Comment 5

[Paul Chen]

marking p3, future, and adding helpwanted and qawanted

Comment 6

[Jimmy Sieben]

I just had a similar thing happen. All of my bookmarks were lost. This is the
second time in three months this has happened to me, but I cannot determine what
causes it.

Comment 7

[Peter Trudelle]

mass reassign of pchen bookmark bugs to ben

Comment 8

[Chris Lyon]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87864 ***

Comment 9

[Diego Biurrun]

v