307051 - bookmarks and theme are wiped out everytime mozilla firefox updates

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 284099

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Jennifer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

I NEVER click on the notification link to download the update to Mozilla Firefox
because every single time I do the updated version completely wipes out every
single bookmared website I've saved since the last update and it resets to the
default theme.  Last night while my computer was defragging it automatically
updated mozilla firefox so I came to my computer this morning finding my theme
gone and not compatible anymore and every single bookmark is wiped out since
february this year.
I suffer from severe medical memory problems and it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to go
back and find all of these bookmarks again (some of them are EXTREMELY important
and business and legal related).
I LOVE mozilla and have recommended it to TONS of friends.  My roommate is a
computer tech and everytime he works on a computer he installs mozilla and
explains to the customers to use it as their default browser because it is far
more secure than any other browser out there.  But I'm getting sick to death of
having to choose not to use updated versions or using them and losing ALL of my
bookmarks I've saved since the last update.  Today I had to do a complete system
restore to get everything back!

You need to fix this problem-first fix it so it won't automatically update!!!! 
Second, fix it so it doesn't wipe out all of the bookmarks we have saved since
the last update!!!!  It completely defeats the purpse of having bookmarks.  From
now on I'm going to make weekly updates of my bookmarks so that I can recover
them from your bugged updates.  It's sad I have to do this.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. click on the link offering updates to mozilla firefox -or-
2. happens automatically when mozilla firefox decides to update itself
3.

Actual Results:  
My theme was no longer applied and it said it was no longer compatible and every
single bookmark I'd saved since the last update I CHOSE to perform (this one
automatically updated while I was asleep when I left my computer on) was GONE.

Expected Results:  
it should have kept all of the bookmarks that I've saved and not deleted them. 
I can understand if the theme was old and not compatible but in the past even
when it was compatible it was unapplied.  It should keep themes applied.

I was using red cats theme but that's not my biggest concern-my biggest concern
is losing all of my bookmarks!

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

it's hard to guess the cause but it's probably an extensionrelated issue.
go to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup and backup th files mentioned
under section "Making a partial backup".

Than uninstall Firefox and delete the profile and Firefox program directory.
Install Firefox 1.0.6 and copy the backed up items into the new profile.
(Note: you can only do that if FF is NOT running)

Now make a full copy of your new profile and start installing extensions/themes.

If anything goes wrong after that, you can simply put the old profile in place
of the one that is corrupted

Comment 2

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

To make your life easier, backup your bookmarks and/or your profile:
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/#bb
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

The automatic updates can be disabled in Options.

As you can guess, this doesn't actually happen to most people, otherwise the bug
wouldn't probably be in production release. If you have any ideas as to what is
so special about your system that triggers this bug, post them to this thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=258366

This is a duplicate of bug 284099.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 284099 ***