277918 - "not-fully-secure" way of saving of important data (i.e. bookmarks, abook)

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Marcin Orlowski]

Mozilla seems to not pay too much attention to ensuring some sensitive and
important data is kept safely on the disk. I am not mean security as such, but
rather availability. For instance, bookmarks.html usually keeps quite huge set
of links user collected for all the time s/he browse the net. Same for
file-stored addressbook. As for now, in case of modification, both these files
are written back in-place. But in case something go wrong you're doomed. If
mozilla crash while writting (rare but possible) you're doomed. If your
filesystem go dizzy and fsck 'fix' it killing your bookmark.html you're doomed.
Saying "backup your stuff dude!" ain't the solution, since those files are
updated/modified quite often. As a solution mozilla should used different saving
scenario and ensure backup copies are made for those files as when they're lost
users start to blame mozilla. I'd like to see the following scenario (i.e.
saving bookmarks.html): recent file is saved to bookmarks.html.tmp (or
whatever). If succesful, mozilla checks if there's bookmarks.html.5 file. If
exists it removes it, renaming bookmarks.html.4 to bookmarsk.html.5 (and repeats
that for 3, 2, 1 suffixed files). Then bookmarks.html gets renamed to
bookmarks.html.1 and bookmarks.html.tmp gets finally renamed to bookmarks.html.
This reduces data lost consequences, even recent bookmarks.html gets corrupted
for any reason we got backup and even more files are gone we got 5 backups to
restore from. Quire sufficient to safely recover

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

The several parts of this report are individually dups of existing bugs.

Rather than enumerate them, I suggest closing this report if it is felt
that it doesn't meet the quality standards of b.m.o bug writing.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.