63918 - Need a Profile Repair Utility

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, enhancement)

Description

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

Even though this is an RFE, I select "Severity=Major" because I just experienced
a very bad thing.

This morning I wrote an e-mail. I have it save sent e-mails to the sent folder.
Nothing very special I did it a million of times. But Tonight when I started
Mozilla again, I got an error message on startup, something like: "Missing ;
after statement. Error in preference file (prefs.js). Please contact your
administrator. Using the default prefs instead."

Following to this, I had a look at my prefs.js and guess what I found there? The
e-mail I sent this morning. It had overwritten all my prefs. In other words I
have now the following situation:

I have a number of e-mail accounts and their associated folders with mails
stored in my profile, but no way to have them linked back to my new profile. I
have also stored a lot of passwords, but Mozilla doesn't remember them, even
though they are still saved in the profile folder.

So we definitely need a way to re-create these links so that a user doesn't have
to re-create the e-mail accounts himself, transfer manually the saved e-mails
and so on. (an average user wouldn't know how to do that anyways).

I know, my Windows 98 is really fucked up, but if it happens on my computer, it
could happen on another one. Also, this utility could clean the prefs.js: If
some e-mail accounts have been deleted, they are still stored in the prefs.js

I understand that this issue cannot be done RSN, but it would be really cool if
we had it for Mozilla 1.0

Comment 1

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

Attachment: My prefs.js file with an e-mail message, an html page and some binary data in it

Comment 2

[A. Craig West]

I was typing this one in myself today, for different reasons... At least while
Mozilla is in development, it is frequently necessary to set up a user profile
from scratch. The problem is that the profile contains a lot of information that
is non-trivial to generate, and there seems to be no mechanism to propagate
information from an old profile to a new one.
I have a manual method that I have been using, which involves copying some of
the files from the old profile, but this was breaking because some line in my
prefs.js was causing the history database to not update itself. As it is, an
update involves a loss of all history information, although now the history does
update normally after the transition...
I am in favour of nominating this as dogfood dataloss.

Comment 3

[Håkan Waara]

This is, at least dataloss.

Comment 4

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

After discussing this issue on IRC, I see that this bug report looks like 2
bugs. It's not. Just forget of the e-mail message saved in the prefs.js (don't
know how this happened and I guess it's because of the repetitive crahses of my
OS - so no Mozilla issue) and take it as an example of a profile corruption like
any other corruption. What I want to say is that it can happen any time your
profile gets corrupted. So there also should be an easy way to repair this. I
can do it manually, so it should be able to be done also with a program.

Comment 5

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

The thing which makes it hard to manually move data from one profile dir to
another is absolute file paths to things which are stored in the profile dir.
Just having that would at least make it possible to manually recover. I will put
that in the mozilla 1.0 milestone. Automatic backup and restore is in the future
(if ever).

Comment 6

[A. Craig West]

I agree with Conrad, much of the work needed for fixing up a profile could be
dealt with by having relative paths be valid in the profile. I am somewhat
curious why we have the current profile directory naming convention...

Comment 7

[Grace Bush]

changing QA contact

Comment 8

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)

Comment 9

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 133091 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 135859 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

*** Bug 128202 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.

Comment 13

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Setting to milestone that's not passed.

Comment 14

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Why are absolute paths used in profile files? It would make it so much easier 
to move and repair profiles if the location of the profiles directory was set 
once in a file in the install directory, and the registry.dat file was the only 
location where the absolute paths to the profiles in the profiles directory was 
set. 

Can someone enlighten me as I have had to rescue profiles dozens of times for 
myself and friends due to absolute path errors. I suspect there is a good 
reason for the absolute paths in prefs.js and panacea.dat but I'd just like to 
know why mozilla can't register their locations in some central location and 
use relative paths in these files.

Comment 15

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

> I suspect there is a good reason for the absolute paths in prefs.js
There's not. But, should be fixed soon - see bug 137006.

Comment 16

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Thanks, that summary doesn't make the bug very easy to find. 

Comment 17

[Stewart Gordon]

If we're going to make a profile repair utility, we should make it for all
platforms.

And it's a bit late to expect it to be in for 1.5a.  I could've done with it
last week actually, but it wasn't to be, so I had to make notes of my newsgroups
and watched threads and rebuild the whole thing from scratch.

Fortunately it turned out straightforward to copy the bookmarks.html and
cookies.txt files and the Mail folder from the old profile to the new one....

Comment 18

[Michael]

Should bug 292688 be marked as a duplicate of this bug?

Comment 19

[Stewart Gordon]

*** Bug 292688 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[Worcester12345]

I suggest someone add the UE and Polish key words. Thanks.

Comment 21

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Old bug not tracking anything useful right now. If you are working on a profile repair feature, please file it as a new bug.