498987 - Local Calendar Data seems to Mysteriously disappear from time to time

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Vaughn L. Reid III]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20
Build Identifier: Lightning 1.0pre

I have experienced data loss from a local calendar file on two or three occasions.  I have experienced this issue with Sunbird .9, Sunbird 1.0pre, and Lightning 1.0pre.

Here's what I've experienced.

To begin with, I have calendar data reaching back to the beginning of 2007.  This means that I have about 2.5 years worth of entries.  I average 5 to 10 entries per week.  I have several recurring entries that recur either on the same date of a month (e.g. 30th) or that recur on the same day of the month (e.g. fist Monday).  Since I deal with several customers at a time, I usually start my entries out by typing CustomerName -- in the Title field of an event.

Now, here's the problem I've now experienced two or three times.

1.  Perform a complete uninstall of Thunderbird and Calendar or Sunbird.  Remove the profile folders in the Windows User Profile, Remove the Program Folders from the Program Files directory.  Perform a registry search and remove any related keys, if any exist.

2.  Perform a clean install of Thudnerbird and Lightning or Thunderbird and Sunbird.  

3.  Import either a .csv or .ics file of all the 2.5 years worth of events.

4.  Use the Calendar product normally for several weeks.

5.  At some point two or three months worth of data go missing.

6.  Export the remaining data as a .csv

7.  Open the .csv file in OpenOffice 3.0 and one of two things happens.  One, I have to place a check in the Other separators option box to get it to import properly into OOCalc so that calendar field (title, date, etc) are a separate spreadsheet field.  Or, two, some of the date entries have the day and the month reversed for the first few single digit days of the month.  That is June 1, 2009 may look like 09/06/09 instead of the correct 06/09/09.  This only seems to happen with a few of the first few days of the month.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to replicate this bug while trying to fashion a fake test calendar.  It only seems to happen after regular use over several weeks time.  It has, however, happened to me in both the release and nightly builds.  In addition, it seems that every time the data loss happens that dates around March, April, and May of the current year are the ones that get lost.

Maybe I've just got a corrupt .ics or .csv file that gets imported initially.  Maybe, after there are so many calendar entries, the data store corrupts.  Maybe the double hypens -- that I insert into the table are messing with the parsing functions.  I don't quite know what is causing the issue.  But it has been very frustrating.


Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Its hard for us to reproduce this issue. I haven't had this behavior in my production profile, although I don't have that many events.

Have you found out why this is happening?

Comment 2

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Note that csv is not a complete format, not all properties can be exported this way. Please use .ics to save events intead.

I'm closing this one as INCOMPLETE for now, please reopen if the bug still occurs.