Closed Bug 170460 Opened 22 years ago Closed 22 years ago

Mozilla loses preferences information on disk full

Categories

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, defect)

x86
Linux
defect
Not set
critical

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 98476

People

(Reporter: hobbes, Assigned: bnesse)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020615 Debian/1.0.0-3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020615 Debian/1.0.0-3

When mozilla exits, it appears to truncate configuration files (prefs.js,
bookmarks.html) before rewriting them.  In the case where the disk is full, the
files will be lost.  This can happen on UNIX-like systems if the disk is full up
to the "superuser reserved blocks", if the new file is larger than the old file
by enough to cross a block boundary, or if another user or process is writing to
disk while mozilla is exiting/saving.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open mozilla
2. su - root
3. fill the disk, eg. "dd if=/dev/zero of=fill-disk bs=1M"
4. close mozilla
5. delete the fill-disk file

Actual Results:  
My prefs.js and bookmarks.html (and maybe others) files are now zero length. 
Next time I start mozilla, I have lost my preferences and bookmarks.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should write to temporary files, then atomically move them over the old
files iff the write succeeded, or some variation on that such that there is
always a copy of the data files on disk.  Then, the worst that happens is that
changes made this session would be lost.

If possible, it would be nice if Mozilla would then display a "disk full"
warning and allow the user to free space so that the latest changes to
preferences can be saved.
This has been fixed in newer builds.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 98476 ***
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 22 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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