Closed Bug 1555201 Opened 7 years ago Closed 7 years ago

All preferences lost after power loss

Categories

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
Preferences: Backend
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1530660

People

(Reporter: BenB, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: dataloss)

(This first paragraph might be irrelevant.) I've built 2019-05-24 trunk and started by "default" production profile. There was a serious bug in that build that prevented me from using it, so I re-compiled trunk from 2019-04-01 and tried to start that build with my "default" production profile. I was not able to, because a dialog told me that downgrades are disallowed. I accepted that a new profile be created, which was automatically called "default-default" (sic), and had none of my preferences or bookmarks. I changed some privacy settings.

I tried my 2019-05-24 trunk build with the "default" production profile again. Then, my cleaning robot dragged the power cable out of the wall socket, resulting in a power loss of the computer. I started it again, and started my 2019-05-24 trunk build with the "default" production profile again.

Now, all my preferences were lost. Everything was back to the defaults. For me, that's catastrophic, because I made a number of critically important security-relevant changes in the profile that absolutely need to be honored, and were not honored, and all the tabs were restored without the prefs. That's a catastrophe from a security standpoint.

I checked the profile folder, and there was a prefs-1.js file which did contain my old preferences. The file was not corrupted. I could simply kill firefox, copy prefs-1.js back to prefs.js, start Firefox again, and everything is fine.

Obviously, that's
a) not something a normal user can do - for him, the loss of preferences is final. For a normal users, this is a data loss bug.
b) too late for me, because all my tabs were loaded without my prefs being honored.

Importance:
Data loss -> Critical

Note: This is not file corruption due to the power outage. The prefs.js file was just fine. This is home-made data loss.

I'm Mozilla dev since 20 years and I can't remember encountering such a problem before, at least not in the last 5 years, so this is either a rare coincidence, or it's a recent code change. The prefs-1.js name suggests this being deliberate, so whatever code does that, that's the cause. That should be checked first: Any code that tries to move prefs.js to a new name with a unique filename.

Severity: normal → critical

not unheard of in support circles, so not necessarily new.

Keywords: dataloss

Sounds a little like bug 1530660?

See Also: → 1556161
OS: Linux → All

I don't see a good reason to treat these as 2 different issues, so I'm making this a dupe.

Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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