458621 - Calendar Entries/Dismissed Reminders Lost After System Restore

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 328603

(Calendar :: Lightning Only, defect)

Description

[EJDagBus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.17 (20080914)

Any calendar entries or dismissed reminders after a restore point are lost when the system is restored.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
To verify the issue first I created some calendar entries and then dismissed them.  Next I created a restore point. Then I created a new calendar entry. Finally I did a system restore.  
Actual Results:  
After the system restore the calendar entry was was lost. Also all the previous calendar entries that were dismissed had to be dismissed again.

Expected Results:  
All calendar entries should be retain and all previous entries dismissed should retain that state.

Since Windows Restore leaves some parts of the file system alone (such as the user data), the location where the data files are restored is probably not protected.

Comment 1

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Lightning uses the same file system location as Thunderbird does. That would imply that you also can't restore your mail data. Is that true?

Comment 2

[EJDagBus]

I use Thunderbird for gmail. To test the affect on email accounts I created some files in drafts and local folders. Following a system restore the drafts and local folders remained intact.  When I looked further into why, it is because their data is saved to the C:\Users\Edward... local folders.

After dismissing a calendar entry, following the restore I was again prompted for it. Thus I assume that Lightning is storing the results somewhere other than the user's directory, and thus gets reset by Windows after a restore.

Comment 3

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Can you also test with a local storage calendar (no ics file)? Maybe it's some issue with the Google calendar.

Comment 4

[EJDagBus]

Actually the problem is with the local calendar. I am not using the google calendar at all. I simply installed Lightning and started to put in entries into the calendar.

Comment 5

[Bas van den Bosch]

This is intended behaviour, the storage.sdb is in your profile and gets restored too when you do a system restore. Quite some people rescued their appointment-data from a restore point already. I suggest setting to wontfix.

Comment 6

[EJDagBus]

It seems odd to me that the intended behaviour is for you to lose all of your calendar entries and reminder dismissals since the last restore. Would you want a system restore to lose all of your new documents? I wouldn't. 

System restore is not intended to restore documents, including for those people who rescued their appointment data with a restore (I consider calendar entries as personal documents of sort). That should come from a backup. Depending on the system problem I have done restores back many days. I would hate to lose all those entries I made.

My motivation to moving toward Thunderbird and Lightning was to find alternatives to Outlook. I don't recall ever losing an Outlook calendar entry from a restore (although I never tested for it). I also don't recall losing a dismissed reminder. I should note this was under XP.

It seems to me the calendar data should be located where it is safe from a system restore, just as all of your documents are safe. To me a wont fix means I will have to look for another calendar program that I can trust the data. I don't want to have to remember to save my calendar data before I do a restore as I do now.

Comment 7

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

If you are using Lightning all your calendar data and settings are stored in your Thunderbird profile folder. On Windows this defaults to "%APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>". See previous discussion in Bug 361800.

Comment 8

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

Isn't this a duplicate of bug 328603 ? Renaming the file to something different than storage.sdb will get it out of windows' system restore watchlist...

Comment 9

[Bas van den Bosch]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa378870.aspx

doesn't show *.sdb but we know from experience storage.sdb gets restored too.

Comment 10

[Bas van den Bosch]

In the filelist.xml on my winxp-prof the extension sdb is listed in the watchlist. This means bug 328603 will break the possibility of restoring broken profiles as sqlite isn't listed.