282641 - Bookmarks and folders get deleted randomly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

Description

[restnessizzle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999
Build Identifier:  Firefox/1.0

Bookmarks and folders get deleted randomly.  Here is an e-mail I sent to my
collages who also use FireFox 1.0:

I have a lot of bookmarked sites, and they need to be organized in
folders.  Well, after awhile, i noticed some of my bookmarked Maddox
pages where gone, then more were gone.  Last week I bookmarked 2 new
sites, and put them in their own folder, after 2 days, they were gone.
This **** me off, so I thought while logging in to my computer, "I
should ask the group about this."  I clicked on my bookmarks and now
about 1/8th of what I used to have bookmarked is gone.  The sites that
remain arn't sites that I frequent, this really **** me off, for now
I have to try and find all of those lost sites, some of which I loved
to view, such as the Auschwitz photography site.  Has this happened to
anyone else?  What can be done to prevent it?

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start FireFox
2.Click on Bookmarks menu
3.See missing bookmarks

Actual Results:  
I saw that my bookmarks that I have had for about a month were gone.  Also
bookmarks I've had for 2 days were gone.

Expected Results:  
Not deleted my bookmarks randomly.

Comment 1

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Dupe of bug 249150 Bookmarks file is overwritten (deleted) randomly

Comment 2

[restnessizzle]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Dupe of bug 249150 Bookmarks file is overwritten (deleted) randomly

I read over the other bug.  What happened to me was that bookmarks would be
deleted at random, one by one until resently where most of them were gone, not
all at once.  Also, I didn't have this problem from upgrading FireFox, therefore
I do believe that my bug is a different issue.

Thanks,
Mark

Comment 3

[mozilla sucks and ALWAYS will!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

same here, TWICE, except it happened both times when i had to restart the
computer after a program crashed. i've also permanently lost mail folders and
preferences in thunderbird several times while trying to update my mail preferences.

i absolutely HATE ie or anything associated with ms but i'm fed up with this
crapware and very reluctantly going back to ie. all of the **** hype in the
world can't change that mozilla software is just **** AND UNRELIABLE. it's
always been that way and apparently always will be. 

Comment 4

[restnessizzle]

I was the one who reported this bug.  Nothing seems to have been done.  It has
happened again.  I lost all of my bookmarks that I have saved sense the last
complete deletion.  I do not know what to do about this.  Please respond to my
request..

Comment 5

[Michael]

Nothing is going to happen in solving this bug since there is no information
about being able to reproduce this issue. If there is then you can expect
someone to confirm that they can reproduce it by making this bug NEW. From there
the person assigned to the bug will then investigate and create a patch that can
be landed.

The best I can suggest is try looking in your profile folder and see if there
are any "bookmark" labelled files, rename the extension to ".html" and see if it
contains the missing bookmarks.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder

Check this thread for some more ideas:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=179652

And to protect against this in future install the bookmark backup extension so
that you can always retrieve an old copy of your bookmarks in case this happens
again.
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/?extension=bb

In future use the Support Forums to list your issue and if it is a bug you can
reproduce on a clean install with a new profile then file a bug stating the
problem and steps to reproduce.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38

Comment 6

[rtm]

I was on my computer and the electric power was lost. After regaining power I
restarted the computer, got back on line, started firefox and went to my
bookmarks and about half of my previous bookmarks were gone completely. My
folders are there and those bookmarks are there but the misc bookmarks are about
half gone!

Comment 7

[rtm]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I was on my computer and the electric power was lost. After regaining power I
> restarted the computer, got back on line, started firefox and went to my
> bookmarks and about half of my previous bookmarks were gone completely. My
> folders are there and those bookmarks are there but the misc bookmarks are about
> half gone!

Well this happened again today, but this time all the bookmarks disappeared. The
electricity went off, I started computer again, got on line started firefox went
to bookmarks and they were all gone.  I did have a backup I did 3 hours before
so I restored it with the backup.

Comment 8

[Joyan]

(In reply to comment #7)
This happened to me two days ago.
1. Why isn't this a FAQ? it seems to happen often enough. Is there no solution
or something? might be courteous to just put it down as a bug on the FAQ page...
2. is there a reason theres no solution to this..? something has to be actually
programmed to make it perform this action.. 
3. How do i import bookmarks now...?

Comment 9

[Dougall]

Similar again (twice now) lost ALL bookmarks & folders upon opening Firefox
after a system reboot. Unable to reproduce (deliberately anyway!)

Comment 10

[4slrs]

My bookmarks were there yesterday and poof today nothing. I had a very long
organized list of bookmarks with folders.  Since I am job hunting, this was
devastating.  Thank you for your time.

Comment 11

[Kiel Goodenow]

Yeah, I opened Firefox up, and my homepage was gone along with all my bookmarks,
and my stumble upon bar. It was as if I had just started using Firefox

Comment 12

[edward ash]

This seems to be related to a TIME based clean up...
Or even by number??
I know I have over 2-3000 links...  does this take up to much RAM for it to hold?
Or something like TIME, If I dont visit it, it GOES AWAY...
Thats stupid, as I search for locations for ALOT of people...besides myself, and
HOLD them.

Comment 13

[edward ash]

Its a wonder that the links/dir arent Write protected.  or at least READ ONLY.
All it would take is a small bot to erase them, even randomly, to REALLy mess
this program up.
Be interesting if it was a inclusion in part of MS site setups...
run a couple flash/java/html/shtml/whatever bots to test a browser, and see what
it can mess up.

Comment 14

[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

Comment 15

[Tracy Hall Jr]

I just lost a bunch of bookmark folders after "upgrading" to Firefox 3. I never had the problem before. Also, the old bug where a bookmark list that would not scroll when trying to adding a bookmark to a point above the top or below the bottom of the list, for which there was a patch, has re-appeared. When I installed 3.0 I got a message that the old patch was not compatible with 3.0!

Comment 16

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

The old bookmarking system in Firefox 2.0 and earlier was susceptible to dataloss in a number of situations that have been fixed by moving to the new bookmarking engine in Firefox 3.0.  Since Firefox 2.0 is no longer supported, this bug is now INVALID.