348067 - Detect loss of bookmarks and warn user immediately

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 414715

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[VanillaMozilla]

Loss of bookmarks continues because sometimes users do not notice the loss until all the backups are overwritten.  For a recent example:  http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=449507 .  In addition, whether bookmarks are lost or just misplaced in another profile, many people never recover their bookmarks.  A stopgap is urgently needed before version 3.

Loss or misplacement of bookmarks should be detectable in most cases.  Users should be notified with a popup message, which should also tell the user:
(1) the locations of the bookmarks and backup files in the current profile;
(2) in the case of Windows, that the files are in a hidden directory; and
(3) that the user can open and view the files with any browser.

Lost or missing bookmarks could be detected when:
(1) a missing or corrupted "bookmarks.html" is replaced automatically;
(2) a missing profile is replaced automatically (e.g., if "profiles.ini" is missing or corrupted).

The first is, or was, thought to be a common cause of bookmarks loss (see bug 289615).  Loss of profile seems to be common during updates.  In either case, the user should be notified explicitly where to look for the intact user data files.

One other possible grounds for a warning:  If "bookmarks.html" is substantially smaller than the previous backup, that suggests that the file might have been accidentally truncated, although user editing could give a false positive.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

actually this is somehow different, 3.x restores bookmarks from a json backup that ideally should be complete (unless some bug is hit), instead we still could have cases where the bookmarks database is locked, and we are considering that case in bug 414715.
So i'm duping this to that since in the generic bookmarks lost case we should restore bookmarks from json, if that does not work for any reason we could be unable to detect it.