556988 - Bookmarks sub-folder disappeared

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Jon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

One of the bookmrarks sub-folders seems to be missing for no apparent reason (Bookmarks > archived > L to P).  

I am currently using Mozilla FF with Xmarks Add-On to sync my bookmarks online, and, the bookmarks with the missing sub-folder (hence loss of bookmarks even online) seems to have been updated online as well.

Moreover, every now and then I found sub-folders "moved" that I hadn't moved or sorted manually, which looks uncommon to me.

Has anyone encountered similar problems?

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce



Expected Results:  
I would expect the bookmarks to remain "as is" until I re-organize them manually.

Comment 1

[Jon]

Attachment: Bookmarks file

Comment 2

[Jon]

Attachment: Version Numbers

Comment 3

[Jon]

Attachment: Archived bookmarks file (20090522)

Previous bookmarks file, which includes some of the bookmarks that seemed to have disappeared.  See README.docx*

NOTE: Requires Microsoft Word 2007 or similar software.

Comment 4

[Jon]

Is it possible that someone could have hacked the bookmarks file?

Comment 5

[Jon]

"There are a number of things that can cause your bookmarks to disappear, but none of them are due to Xmarks itself. If Firefox doesn't shut down properly, your bookmarks file on disk can become corrupted, for instance. There may be a problem with your profile, the set of files in which Firefox stores all of the information specific to your installation, including your bookmarks. Xmarks can't prevent these problems from happening. But we are trying to limit the damage by detecting when this problem has occurred, and by providing this information to help you recover.

If you need further help, please give us more details about the issue you're having below. "

Source: http://getsatisfaction.com/foxmarks/topics/my_bookmarks_disappeared_whats_going_on.

It is true that sometimes my laptop freezes and due to a separate problem with the operating system (Win XP) shutdown could not even be done, hence, this could be a corruption from my part, from the point of view of the above article.

Comment 6

[Jon]

I've noticed that when adding a new bookmark, for http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page, by selecting Bookmarks > Bookmark this page, the sub-folder 'Life Hacking' was automatically selected.

This sub-folder was previously available in my bookmarks hierarchy, although now it seems to have disappeared due to this bug, so I couldn't find the bookmark anywhere by browsing the bookmarks hierarchy that I currently have, although I can look it up from the Library, by searching for the domain name, for example, 'wikihow.com'.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

try these steps:
Open error console, in the eval field paste the following code and click Eval:
Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/PlacesDBUtils.jsm");PlacesDBUtils.checkAndFixDatabase();

after some second you will get a log, copy/paste it here please.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

notice that the above phrase "There are a number of things that can cause your bookmarks to disappear, but none of them are due to Xmarks itself" is not completely true, Xmarks like weave and other extensions is actually acting on bookmarks, adding and removing them, plus observing them, for this reason i doubt they can tell there is no way their extension could cause troubles. It would be like saying xmarks can't have bugs.

Comment 9

[Jon]

It has been noted that one of my sub-folders (Bookmarks > archived > 'U to Z') has been "automatically renamed", in error, to the name of a sub-folder I had just created within another sub-folder (Bookmarks > archived > 'K to P'.

Comment 10

[Jon]

With regards, to the commends made by Marco Bonardo on 20.04.2010, it is known that all software can have bugs.

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

To me this sounds like database corruption, whether xmarks is involved or not, I suggest to create a new profile and import bookmarks to it.

Comment 12

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Jon -> Any update? Did you create a new profile?

Comment 13

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Closing bug as Incomplete - if you are still experiencing this issue or have more information to provide feel free to post back here and we can re-open the bug. You can also get assistance by visiting the Firefox help site -> https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/ask