Closed Bug 1541809 Opened 6 years ago Closed 6 years ago

After Windows BSOD, Firefox lost all data, including addons data

Categories

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, defect, P3)

Product:
Core
Component:
Preferences: Backend
Version:
67 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1530660

People

(Reporter: juraj.masiar, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

My Windows crashed unexpectedly and after booting up again, my Firefox behaves like I've just installed in - although my last session was recovered!
Note that:

  1. my session was recovered
  2. all my add-ons are here
  3. all cookies and stored passwords are here
  4. my Firefox is still using the same profile folder

However:

  1. all add-ons data are gone - all of my add-ons has new UUID!
  2. Firefox lost all settings - visual, about:config, and basically everything you can set in the about:preferences page
  3. page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0a2/firstrun/ was opened (seriously? first run?), also I'm running "67.0b7 (64-bit)", not sure why it says 67.0a2

I know things like BSOD are not something you see every day, however I would expect not to loose ALL add-ons data!!! I'm happy though the session was restored as I have many windows and tabs opened...

Can you check if there is a crash report associated with the crash you experienced in about:crashes?

Component: Untriaged → General
Product: Firefox → Toolkit
Flags: needinfo?(juraj.masiar)

Sadly no, there are no crash reports from that date - as this was not a Firefox crash.
PC actually crashed due to static electricity after I touched the USB flash drive (Windows error log mentions power failure).

I would say Firefox was probably writing some file which got corrupted and caused the bug.

Flags: needinfo?(juraj.masiar)

Core :: Preferences Backend may be a stretch, but it's the best I can find for this given that I think everything in the "However" clause above is tied into prefs.

Component: General → Preferences: Backend
Product: Toolkit → Core

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:njn, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Flags: needinfo?(n.nethercote)

It sounds like your saved preferences file might have gotten corrupted or deleted somehow.

Can you please do the following:

This might not be conclusive, though. If the file did get deleted or corrupted somehow and you then ran Firefox afterwards, it would get refilled with a bunch of setting from that run.

Beyond that, I don't think much can be done here. It sounds like you got unlucky about when Windows crashed :(

Flags: needinfo?(n.nethercote) → needinfo?(juraj.masiar)
Priority: -- → P3

I agree, there is probably not much that can be done and indeed I just got unlucky... Maybe turning off RAPID mode on my SSD would prevent it as well, but it's hard to say.

But seeing how small the "prefs.js" file is and how important it is, maybe it would make sense to create backup of it automatically just like the "sessionrestore.bak" file?

PS: to find your profile, it's much easier to open "about:support" page and click "Open Folder" button next to Profile Folder label :)

Flags: needinfo?(juraj.masiar)

I don't think there's anything else to be done here.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 6 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE

I'm not sure if you are aware but there is a lot of users reporting this behavior to me (I'm author of GroupSpeedDial add-on), but they are saying it's after Firefox upgrade.

Also as impossible as it sounds, this now happened to me again, but on a different PC after it failed to wake up from hibernation.

I'm pretty sure this is no accident and there is something else going on. I mean, it's like being strike by lightning twice!

Resolution: INCOMPLETE → DUPLICATE
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