1888487 - See if the profile backup mechanism could replace the existing profile refresh mechanism

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Migration, task, P3)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Bug 1883052 is a meta for a new feature we're investigating that'd allow us to create backups of a user profile at runtime, and then to make it possible to restore from those backups by injecting their data into new user profiles.

This sounds very similar to what we do with the Profile Refresh mechanism - however, the backup system has the advantage of not requiring us to release the user profile in order to create the backup.

We should see whether or not we can re-use the profile backup mechanism to support the profile refresh case. I can imagine it working a bit like this:

1. User initiates a profile refresh
2. A limited backup is generated. This would not include preferences nor addons. There's probably a whole host of other things we wouldn't include, since the "refresh" case is supposed to be almost like "factory reset" except for critical information like bookmarks, history, passwords, form history, and a few other things unlikely to have caused browser instability.
3. We restore from that backup, and make the restored user profile the default.

If that works, we could get rid of the fairly fragile dance that we do during startup to support the existing refresh mechanism.