292207 - Some address books were discovered to be empty - but backups had been created

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 299346

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Dennis Jennings]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

I noticed that address auto completion in Thunderbird was getting progressively
slower, so I checked my address books.  I discovered that about a third of my
address book were empty.  (My address books are MAB files of the form abook-xx
where xx is a one or two digit number). However, all the empty address books had
a backup address book as BAK files in the form abook-xx.mab.  So I could select
all and copy and paste back into the address book to restore the addresses. 
Somewhat weirder was the fact that some of the empty address books had multiple
backups - of the form abook-xx.mab-xx and in some cases the latest backup file
was also empty, but the abook-xx.mab-1 had the addresses (although
abook-xx.mab-xx files other than where xx was 1 were also empty).  So in those
cases I was also able to rescue the address entries.  In some cases there were
up to 135 such additional backup files, in others only 35 or so).

Weird!

The only possibility I can think of is that I am running Google Desktop which
has recently been upgraded to search Thunderbird files.  It's great - but when I
first ran it, it was definitley causing problems with Thunderbird, causing it to
slow or stall.  Perhaps the initial Google indexing of my e-mail files caused
file access conflicts that caused Thunderbird to get into a loop in backing up
individual address books.  But this is entirely a speculation.

I will monitor my address books more closely to see if there is a recurrence of
this problem

Thank you for Thunderbird - it is great.

Dennis

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1. I recovered my address book entries by copying the backup address book file
contents into the address book.  Crude - but I could find no way to tell
Thunderbird to restore individual address books from backup.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Reporter, this seems to me like a duplicate of bug 286649, please could you 
have a look at the comments on that one.

If you don't mind sending me a copy of one of the bak files, I would be very 
grateful as that may help me in tracking down the problem - I will, of course, 
not disclose addresses in it and delete it when I am finished.

Also, do you have any books with mailing lists in, did they "disappear" or 
empty as well?

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We have recently checked in a couple of bugs that will hopefully fix this or at
least help diagnose it. See bug 299346 and bug 287003. The fix should be in the
latest nightlies, but will most certainly be in the next beta release. Please
comment on those bugs if you are still having problems.

I'm duping this bug to 299346 as that seems the closest one.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 299346 ***

Comment 3

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

reopening to mark fixed since the bug this is duped forward to has been reopened.  Marking dependancy against bugs listed in comment #2

Comment 4

[Dennis Jennings]

Hi.

I subsequently confirmed that the problem was with Google Desktop - using Google Desktop immediately corrupted the Thunderbird address files.

So I stopped using Google Desktop - and I won't dare even try it until someone at Google (who are impossible to contact) or Mozilla confirms that the problem has been solved.

I think that it is a Google Desktop problem - possibly not paying attention to whatever Address book lock file Thunderbird uses to ensure coorect address book updates.

Thanks
Dennis

Comment 5

[Dennis Jennings]

Hi.

I subsequently confirmed that the problem was with Google Desktop - using Google Desktop immediately corrupted the Thunderbird address files.

So I stopped using Google Desktop - and I won't dare even try it until someone at Google (who are impossible to contact) or Mozilla confirms that the problem has been solved.

I think that it is a Google Desktop problem - possibly not paying attention to whatever Address book lock file Thunderbird uses to ensure coorect address book updates.

Thanks
Dennis

Comment 7

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

Sorry, why is this being duped forward?