1326561 - All data in Sync is lost!

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Evaldas]

Attachment: error-sync-1483199660039.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161208153507

Steps to reproduce:

Well i stopped using Firefox for about half year, and now I installed it again and then i logged to my Firefox sync account, it didn't updated anything, where isn't any old bookmarks or any passwords left, just clean account..


Actual results:

Sync data erased.

Comment 1

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Hi Evaldas, thanks for the report and I'm sorry to hear this didn't work as you expected.

Did you do a password reset when logging in to your Firefox Account?  This is one situation that unfortunately causes sync data to be lost, because the encryption keys for sync are obtained from your account password.  If you reset the password, the sync data can no longer be decrypted.

Comment 2

[Evaldas]

No, I didn't. 
I have never changed my password.

Comment 3

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

OK, thanks.  The most likely explanation then is that your account got a "node reassignment" on the server, which basically means that the sync data was reset for operational reasons, e.g. a storage node dying and having to be replaced.

Unfortunately the current sync system was not really designed as a persistent backup - it's designed to do a good job of shuffling data between multiple devices, but not necessarily of keeping data around on the server.

So I'm afraid I can't do anything to help you here; closing this RESOLVED/WONTFIX because it's not actionable in the short term :-(

However, we are trying to figure out how to make Sync be a better backup system in 2017.  I'm cc'ing Alex (the Product Manager for Sync) for visibility.   Alex, this is another bug for the list of "failed to meet user expectations of a backup service".  When we have a proper plan for sync-as-a-backup-service, let's make sure there's a bugzilla metabug for it so we can close these RESOLVED/DUPLICATE rather than the incredibly-unsatisfying WONTFIX...