1498198 - RSS/Atom Feeds Transformed Into Empty Folders After a Bookmarks Restoration

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1432738

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[peaceeker]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0

Steps to reproduce:

In the Bookmark window (Control+Maj+B) I dragged-and-dropped one big folder (>200 bookmarks and >10 sub-folders) into another, causing the former to disappear. 
I decided to use the backup files to find it back. 
1) I backed up at a previous date (among those listed in the import/restore section)
2) Once backed up, I deleted all bookmarks except my lost folder, and exported in .html
3) I backed up at today's date, then imported the .html containing my lost folder


Actual results:

However, I've just noticed that during the backup process, I lost all of my RSS/Atom feeds. 
There still nominally there with the titles, but they've become FOLDERS instead!
No news, no 'newsfeed logo', no address left in the properties. Just the name, and nothing inside.


Expected results:

I expected a backup to back everything up.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Does that problem persist after the browser restart?

(In reply to peaceeker from comment #0)
> In the Bookmark window (Control+Maj+B) I dragged-and-dropped one big folder
> (>200 bookmarks and >10 sub-folders) into another, causing the former to
> disappear. 

So, you basically moved the folder to a new parent, right?
If so this is not a destructive operation, we just update the parent id of the folder.

> I decided to use the backup files to find it back. 

What do you mean by "find it back", wasn't it just moved?

> 1) I backed up at a previous date (among those listed in the import/restore
> section)

By "backed up", do you mean you "Restored" a previous backup?

> 2) Once backed up, I deleted all bookmarks except my lost folder, and
> exported in .html

How long did you wait? I wonder if it's possible the restore wasn't complete yet, so what you exported was partial.

> I expected a backup to back everything up.

Ok, I'm not completely sure of why you did all of the above operations, and it's possible that mixing up backups and html and without waiting long enough, things are messed up.
Maybe you also have Sync enabled?

What I suggest is just to open the Library, restore to a backup BEFORE all of this mess, and leave it a lone for a while. Check livemarks are there before moving on.

Note that we are removing the livemarks feature in Firefox 64, see this blog post:
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/

Comment 2

[peaceeker]

Oops, I'm sorry, English is not my first language and I mixed up "to back up" with "to restore". My bad. But you guessed I meant "restore". I'll change the title as well.

> So, you basically moved the folder to a new parent, right?
> If so this is not a destructive operation, we just update the parent id of the folder.

That's right. This is not supposed to be a destructive operation indeed, but my computer became very slow, Firefox froze for a few seconds, and when it came back normal the folder was nowhere to be found (neither where it was or where I wanted it to be, or elsewhere). This is what I meant by "causing the former to disappear".

Hence, my attempt to find it back.

My strategy was to restore to Sunday's backup, remove all bookmarks except my lost folder, export in html, restore to today's backup, and import in html.
And I have to stress that this worked very well! Exactly as expected!

If it wasn't for the RSS feeds becoming empty folders, I wouldn't be here.

So you can forget all the details about the first part with my lost folder (my computer is very slow, that's the main reason). 

The issue is that bookmark restoration doesn't bring back RSS feeds. Instead, all I have is a collection of empty folders.

No, Sync is not enabled.

I didn't know Live Bookmarks will be pulled out, but they're not yet, right? I have about 50 feeds, and I'd like to find the URLs back instead of finding them manually. Is it possible to parse the .json files with a text editor to find them?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This add-on should allow to decompress lz4 files (like the bookmark backups):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozlz4-edit/
Or you can find a python script here:
https://gist.github.com/mnordhoff/25e42a0d29e5c12785d0
Or a decompressor here:
https://github.com/avih/dejsonlz4

Once the file is decompressed, it's a normal json file, so you can use a json formatter to go through it, it's just text.

Comment 4

[peaceeker]

My computer is too slow for the addon to work. My .jsonlz4 files are >12Mo. There are almost 100K bookmarks. 

I'll make a copy and try on another computer.

Comment 5

[peaceeker]

I've just noticed another problem.

On top of losing my RSS feeds, I had also lost most of the bookmark labels. I had about 50 labels, and there are just 6 left now.

Comment 6

[peaceeker]

"labels", most probably called "tags" in English

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I'm not sure we can do much here, the problem is that by not waiting you ended up exporting an incomplete representation of bookmarks. The problem here is that there's no visual indication of restoring still running, that is bug 1432738

Comment 8

[peaceeker]

I did wait but the computer couldn't cope. 
Indeed, I wanted to suggest some kind of progress bar.