confirmation before purge paces.sqlite when disk space is low
Categories
(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: dindog, Unassigned)
References
Details
Bug 1753729
I meet this issue and take me quite some time to located the problem is my disk available space is too low.
I lost 200K history entries without any acknowledgement. Angry user now I am, and surely I am not the only one.
Firefox should prompt alert or confirmation before it purge the database.
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Comment 1•3 years ago
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I don't think that'd be useful, purging is done to preserve performance and functionality, even if we'd put a warning the user could not Cancel the operation because we think it's necessary. Just warning that "we're about to purge data" wouldn't help. Data has to go at a certain point and we cannot guarantee the product will work as expected if that doesn't happen.
It's unfortunate the limit was a bit low, new limits should be better.
:dingdog You're not alone.
:mak I've done my very best, with my limited power as a user, to opt-out of the browser history expiration implementation which you led many years ago. I have never noticed performance or functionality degradation, even on several-year-old machines, and, even if I did, to me performance degradation would be an acceptable cost of retaining all browser history. In contrast, when I have been affected by browser history expiration ("purging") it has caused me 10s of hours of frustration undoing the deletion and carefully restoring from backups. I have on a number of occasions considered giving negative feedback on this implementation but refrained because I considered writing in the heat of the moment would be an error of judgement. Please understand that what you (pl.) deem as "necessary" has cost me 10s of hours of time and frustration.
I don't accept your claim that the "data has to go at a certain point" or that purging is necessary has any basis except personal opinion. I determine for myself, based on my opinion, when my data has to stay or go. I don't accept that you, or the "we" you refer to above, have any legitimacy to act as stewards of my data. Your performance in those times when I have been unable to prevent you from acting, without permission, as steward has unequivocally been abysmal: my history data has been deleted - not only without my consent but after I had done everything within my power to ensure the history data would be retained.
To whom does the browser history data belong? I say that it belongs to me. I am very explicitly asking you (pl.) to not delete my data without my explicit consent. Please respect that request.
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Comment 3•3 years ago
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I'm sorry that your experience with Firefox is not the best for your specific use case. Our decisions are not taken on a personal preference, but to satisfy the vast majority of systems and users we have. The decision to purge history at a certain point is something that all the browsers had to make, for obvious reasons, no embedded database system can handle infinite amount of information. The size we choose allows Firefox to hold a bit more than one year of history for a very large percentage of our users. There's of course unsupported ways to bypass those limits, and we always clarified we don't provide technical support if you take those paths, it's unexplored territory.
If in the future we'll find opportunities to increase the storage space, we'll surely do.
I must also note that the issue in comment 0 was not due to the normal expiration, but due to a bug occured because the profile was moved into a storage space with very limited amount of space. That was again an uncommon operation and we fixed the problem as soon as it was uncovered.
Feel free to continue providing feedback, we're glad to continue investigating. In this case anyway for technical reasons we don't plan to allow the user to bypass expiration through the UI.
I think you misunderstood. I am not saying Firefox should not purge in any case. I meant to say Firefox should alert users before it do it, allowing a chance users can make disk space themselves to avoid data loss.
The latest full places.sqlite backup I got dates back to 2019. I had to make decision stay with the loss most of its data newer history, or a more than two years old one.
Finally, I learn SQLite for a whole day before I've managed to merge the old places.sqlite to the new one.(partly, at least, it is not easy to do with table contained foreign key constraints for a newbie to sql). I would have saved a day without learning the abc of SQLite.
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Comment 5•3 years ago
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(In reply to dindog from comment #4)
I think you misunderstood. I am not saying Firefox should not purge in any case. I meant to say Firefox should alert users before it do it, allowing a chance users can make disk space themselves to avoid data loss.
We could introduce a notification, like "hey your disk space it low, part of your history may be removed in the next hours".
It wouldn't provide any choice apart from "ok" and it would be dismissed after a few sessions if one doesn't make a choice.
In no way it would allow to bypass limits.
If this is sufficient for you, I'd be ok keeping it as an enh request.
Description
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