1244230 - All logins and passwords lost after upgrade

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1242176

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

After I upgraded from 43 to 44 on Fedora 23 (distro packages), all logins and passwords were lost. I recovered logins.json and key3.db from a backup, and everything went back to normal; but the new passwords saved in the meantime are definitely lost.

This has already happened to me several times in the past during upgrades. I have no idea how to reproduce this, but I'd like to help finding a fix or a mitigation. What I noticed is that logins.json looks correct, which means the corruption happened to key3.db. Is there a way to compare the new key3.db file (which I saved before restoring it) to the backup to check what may have gone wrong?

I also wonder whether it would be possible for Firefox to backup the logins and passwords when it detects a corrupt file. Losing user data as sensitive as passwords is not acceptable IMHO. If a backup was made and errors displayed to the user, at least debugging would be possible.

One interesting point, which may or may not be related, is that SQLite was upgraded from 3.10.0 to 3.10.2 at the same time as Firefox. This shouldn't explain the bug, since after restoring the files and using 3.10.2 everything works, but maybe some weird interaction is going on.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

If you go to about:config, is the "privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords" pref set to true ?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

bug 1242176 seems related except that clearly Norton isn't involved here and it seems odd that this would have happened before now.

Comment 3

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Do you mean it happened other times upgrading to 44? Bug 1242176 only started in Fx44+

Comment 4

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> If you go to about:config, is the "privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords" pref
> set to true ?

No, that option doesn't appear at all in my settings. Is that expected?

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] from comment #3)
> Do you mean it happened other times upgrading to 44? Bug 1242176 only
> started in Fx44+

Sorry, I meant when upgrading to older versions of Firefox. It happened enough times that I wasn't totally surprised to see this again today.

Comment 5

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #2)
> bug 1242176 seems related except that clearly Norton isn't involved here and
> it seems odd that this would have happened before now.

Reading that bug, indeed I now remember that the "Remember identifiers" (maybe that's "passwords" in Englih, my UI is in French) checkbox was unchecked when I first started FF44. But it was certainly checked before that, since I always use the password manager.

I was also wrong when I said above that key3.db was corrupt: actually, it has the same size as the backup. It's logins.json which was almost empty after the upgrade, i.e. it contained only this:
{"nextId":213,"logins":[],"disabledHosts":[],"version":1}

I also have privacy.sanitize.migrateClearSavedPwdsOnExit set to true. No idea why, but my profile is very old (from Firefox 3 or 4), so weird settings might have been present. What's the meaning of this setting?

So overall it's very similar, though of course Norton isn't involved. The fact that I have seen similar issues with previous Firefox versions may be a red herring.

Comment 6

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(In reply to Milan Bouchet-Valat from comment #5)
> I also have privacy.sanitize.migrateClearSavedPwdsOnExit set to true. No
> idea why, but my profile is very old (from Firefox 3 or 4), so weird
> settings might have been present. What's the meaning of this setting?

In Fx44 having privacy.sanitize.migrateClearSavedPwdsOnExit set means we removed all your logins on startup as part of the incorrect migration of privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords. We then clear privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords so you wouldn't see it still set to true after.

privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords mapped to the Saved Passwords checkbox in https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2015-05-11-19-48-39-3cd15f.png which is part of the "Clear History when Firefox Closes" feature that you can read about at https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/supprimer-historique-recent#w_comment-puis-je-effacer-mon-historique-automatiquementa

> So overall it's very similar, though of course Norton isn't involved. The
> fact that I have seen similar issues with previous Firefox versions may be a
> red herring.

You or an extension likely flipped that pref in the future but also had the top-level checkbox unchecked which should have meant that no data was cleared upon closing Firefox. Unfortunately, the migration code didn't take that checkbox for the overall feature into account in Fx44 (it was fine in Fx42-43).

Since you have privacy.sanitize.migrateClearSavedPwdsOnExit = True and you didn't have the hotfix or Fx45+ then this is a dupe of bug 1242176.