265120 - Bookmark backup is either broken or useless, bookmarks.bak is always a copy of bookmarks.html

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[ed]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10.1

This is 1.0PR on Linux and MacOS. When my start page is a bookmark then
Bookmarks.bak is updated when nothing has happened eliminating it's value as a
backup

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.enable bookmark backups start firefox then exit it without doing anything
2.Look at bookmarks.html and bookmarks.bak they will be freshly updated and be
identical.
3.

Actual Results:  
Both bookmarks and bookmarks.bak had been updated and were identical

Expected Results:  
I would not expect bookmarks.html to be updated unless something had been
accessed (caveat, my default startup page is a bookmark). I would not expect
bookmarks.bak to be updated unless I had explicitly edited my bookmarks, i.e.
added, removed, moved or edited a bookmark - updating e.g. access times should
not update a backup.

I reiterate, the value of a backup is to protect against user error, therefore
the backup should only be updated as a consequence of USER action

Comment 1

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

The bookmarks backup is inteded to protect against certain data loss filesystem
bugs, usually due to the OS going down at a bad time.  It's not intended to be a
"previous bookmarks state" backup.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change