468383 - Unable to restore bookmarks after system restore

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[c_harbaugh2000]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

I backed up my bookmarks onto an external drive, formatted my hard drive and reinstalled XP and Firefox. I copied the JSON file back into the "bookmark backup" folder and attempted to restore. Error message reads, "Unable to process the backup file."

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I tested this with Firefox 3.0.4 on Windows XP and was not able to reproduce the problem. Although it appeared to be blind for files with a changed name. But in that case I could use the "Choose File..." option.
Is it possible that this file is "read-only" now after copying it to the external drive?

Comment 2

[c_harbaugh2000]

The JSON file is not "read-only"

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

most likely it contains some bogus node. should be fixed on trunk and on 3.0.5, notice however that you old bookmarks backups are corrupt so new versions will correctly backup bookmarks but won't be able to import old corrupt backups.

Comment 4

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The JSON file is not "read-only"
Won't have made any difference after all; I think I was associating it wrongly to an old bug.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Verified that already on trunk. Setting the status to fixed due to we know which patches have been fixed this dataloss bug.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv