305379 - Bookmarks file truncated in a full hard drive

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Chema]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-AR; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-AR; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6

After a rogue program completely filled my system partition, my bookmarks file
got truncated.

Couldn't say exactly when, I just suddenly saw half my bookmarks had
dissapeared.  Immediately browsed to my profile folder, just to find that the
autobackup was also truncated: I restarted Firefox after the file truncation, it
seems.

I supose this problem could also affect other file saving routines, too, not
only bookmarks.  Strangely, I didn't notice any other odd behavior, I could
browse unhindered.  Maybee Firefox does check free space when caching pages, and
deletes old ones if needed?

You will excuse me if I don't fill my system partition again to reproduce it,
but I got enough weird errors already. ;-)

It seems not a single program I use actually checks for free space: I got plenty
of weird errors because of the filled drive (mostly when programs tried to
create temp files), but no one actually correctly described the actual problem,
had to discover it for myself.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Fill your profile drive.
2. Modify your bookmarks.
3. Cry

Actual Results:  
My bookmarks file was truncated.

Expected Results:  
It should leave the bookmarks file untouched and cry about full drive.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Bug 132517 should have protected you here. Maybe multiple restarts messed
everything up.

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050821
Firefox/1.6a1

See Bug 187777 "new pages won't load if hard-disk is full"

There are several other bugs on partitions being full, I suspect that most
are not being worked on because developers are not being bitten by them 
(and/or consider them solved).

You are right that nobody wants to reproduce this type of problem, and it
seems that there is some variation between platforms.

Personally, I think that Firefox should warn on 'using' partitions more
than 90% full and not write to partitions more than 95% full. Arguably,
whilst a Quit is in progress, all writes should go to a temporary file and
switch/swizzle/pivot the link.

See http://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostWantedDesignBugs.html "Power
Failure Crash"

rlbaugrA .

Comment 3

[OstGote!]

other related bugs: bug 228978

Comment 4

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Bulk closing all UNCONFIRMED bugs dealing with places that haven't had any bug activity in over 120 days, have no votes, and are not enhancement requests.

If you are still experiencing this issue in Firefox 3.0 or later, please re-open the bug with steps to reproduce (if they were not part of the original comment).