1576699 - Bookmarks are Not Syncing Between Computers Using the Same Firefox Profile

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Steven Bock]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Copy Firefox profile folder from one computer to another (modifying Profiles.ini to reflect the change on the second machine).
2. Launch Firefox on the second computer while away from the first/original computer.
3. Create a bookmark.
4. Go back to the first machine and launch Firefox.

Actual results:

The bookmark(s) created on the second machine did not sync/transfer to the original machine.

Expected results:

The bookmarks should have synced/transferred.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Lina Butler (ex-Mozilla)]

Thanks for the report, Steven! Would you mind pulling recent logs from about:sync-log on both profiles, and attaching them here?

Unfortunately, copying a profile like that is very likely to confuse Sync and FxA, because they store client IDs and last sync timestamps in different prefs and databases in the profile. Both will show up as the same device in Send Tab and the device manager, and stomp on each other when they sync. We could detect this case automatically if we had bug 1449672 (and bug 1419505 covers profile cloning in general), but we don't have a reliable way to do that now.

If you disconnect and reconnect Sync, does that fix bookmark syncing for you?

Comment 3

[Lina Butler (ex-Mozilla)]

Bug 1558025 looks like it could be relevant, too. If you copied the profile between Windows and Linux, you may need to delete pkcs11.txt from the copied profile folder.

Comment 4

[Steven Bock]

Attachment: Sync Error Log from Laptop

Comment 5

[Steven Bock]

The second machine is where I found the errors. I attached the log file.

I'll also take a look at the other bugs being referenced and see if there's any similarities.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Lina Cambridge (she/her) [:lina] from comment #3)

Bug 1558025 looks like it could be relevant, too. If you copied the profile between Windows and Linux, you may need to delete pkcs11.txt from the copied profile folder.

The attached log looks like that might be the case. Steven, did you resolve this?

Comment 7

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Thanks again for reporting this issue, but we are unable to determine the cause of the problem without the requested information. If you are able to provide this information, please just add a comment in this bug with that information and we'll get back to you as soon as we can, but in the meantime we are closing this bug so we can focus on the issues which we can address.