1128217 - The newest Thunderbird address lost my Contacts and all my Calendar data, plus I cannot re-import it. I have spend days trying to fix it, reinstalling Thunderbird, trying to import my contacts and Calendar every which way and give up.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[walksdogsherdscats]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150122214805

Steps to reproduce:

The newest Thunderbird update lost all my Contacts and all my Calendar data, plus I cannot successfully re-import it. I have spend days trying it every which way, even reinstalling Thunderbird, trying to import my contacts and Calendar every which way and I give up. 


Actual results:

Address Book lists are scrambled and incomplete.  Calendar is completely unresponsive now.


Expected results:

The Thunderbird address book and the Lighting Calendar were visible off-line, a great feature for those off us who do not live in big cities with steady internet services or have cell phone signal. It has worked beautifully for almost a decade. Why take this away from us?

Comment 1

[walksdogsherdscats]

Attachment: a.txt is a copy/paste of error msgs today.

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

Is there any reason that you requested this to be a security-sensitive bug? Setting this status greatly restricts the group of people who can see and respond to your bug. This does not seem to be a security issue to me.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Did you perhaps have loss of power just before the problem started, or disk error?
Do you not have backups?

Comment 4

[walksdogsherdscats]

I am not a computer pro, just a small business owner that has a laptop computer. Yes, I have both a backup disk and the mozilla backup utility. I marked it sensitive because of all the loss of personal data. 

The backup utility showed me that the fault laid with the new Thunderbird version, so I restored a previous disk backup and I was able to recover my data.  And I set Thunderbird/Lightning not to update to avoid losing my data it again. This way I had manageable data loss and have my contact lists and copious future calendar reminders back. 

The new Thunderbird does not support Lighting, and I had become very dependent on it, And the new address book is not visible off-line, thus useless to me on the road and it defeats to purpose of having an off-line email client. As we have little cell phone coverage in this county and Wifi is far-between, off-line capability is a must for me as I drive around to visit clients. Thank you for your trouble. 

The was no power outage or disk trouble, I just have no use for the latest version of Thunderbird. Thank you.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Sorry you are having trouble and thanks for the feedback. I'm reopening the bug because your original issue is not resolved (going back to a previous version does not mean there is not a potential problem).  We don't want to see you stuck on an old version.

There are several things we do not yet understand

1. what specific version is not working for you (the current version is 31.4.0)? and what specific version did  you revert to?

2. you write that "lost all my Contacts and all my Calendar data and that you cannot reimport it", but  my interpretation of what you have written is that the addressbook and calendar do not work when used offline.  But I do not see how a "restore" of data would resolve that.   So why then did you need to restore?  I also do not understand what you mean by "scrambled".  Please clarify.

3. Did you happen to look at the Toos | Error Console or Tools | Addons for messages or information about why extentions might not be working?

4. Calendar is known to generally work with version 31.4.0, so whatever problem you are seeing is not by design and not a common issue. My suspicion is that for calendar (google provider) you are seeing bug 1092621 or bug 1103637 (it's not clear to me whether these are the same). The preliminary fix for bug 1103637 is the attachment downloadable at bug 1106047 comment 22.

5. I suspect your "contacts" are not local address books but rather contacts synced via an addon or ldap. Please clarify regarding both the source (where the data is located) and the mechanism (addon, protocol, etc) being used.

Any additional information you can share, in addition to answering the above items, would be helpful.  Thanks.