644375 - Upgrade to Firefox 4 loses history

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[S. Ali Tokmen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16

When I upgrade from Firefox 3.6.15 to Firefox 4, my browsing history is lost. In the profile folder, Firefox 4 creates a places.sqlite.corrupt file, with my old history; but this doesn't get imported.

I have history for months of browsing, and losing it would be annoying.

PS: When looking in detail to the differences between the two sqlite files, I see new columns called "guid" have been added to two tables between Firefox 3.6.15 and 4.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have browsing history in Firefox 3.6.15
2. Install Firefox 4
3. Open Firefox 4's history
Actual Results:  
History is empty

Expected Results:  
History should have been converted and imported

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

A working synch setup could be a workaround

Comment 2

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

(In reply to comment #1)
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 620723 ***
How do you know this user installed an old beta build?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I guess that I misunderstood bug 620723

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

How big is that .corrupt file? I'd like to get it by mail to check it.
Otherwise if it's too large, can you please install this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/ then do Connect Database, connect that .corrupt file and run this query on it "PRAGMA integrity_check"

Did you edit that database manually, or used any external application to clean it? If it was marked as corrupt on upgrade, most likely it is not in the expected format. If otherwise ti initially worked but was replaced after some startup of FF4, most likely is a disk corruption.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

and we plan to add history backups soon, to avoid these dataloss.

Comment 6

[S. Ali Tokmen]

The .corrupt file is 23 MB... well at least was.

When my bug was marked as "duplicate" I have downgraded to Firefox 3.6.15 and put back the .corrupted file; and FF 3 had the history back. I then followed Matti's idea to use sync, in order to upload everything, install FF 4, download everything; and it worked!

I therefore do not have my corrupted file anymore. Please note that my places.sqlite file has been here since much older versions of FF, and I have switched from Windows to Mac in between. Perhaps the format was very old, and that old format simply couldn't be imported to FF 4.

Having recovered using Sync, I would say this is a very clean workaround to this bug. I personally wouldn't mind this bug being closed.

Thank you for your valuable help

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

no, we always supported upgrades from any version and downgrades to the previous version (but not 2 or more versions before).

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I'm resolving WFM, if in future you should have a .corrupt file, you can try to analyze it as said in comment 4.

Comment 9

[Greybird]

S. Ali Tokmen: I had the same problem, with the same solution (somewhat), though with a few wrinkles.

When upgrading under WinXP SP3 from Fx v3.5.18 to v4.0.1, all information transferred properly for my user account (JSR). When I then ran Fx v4.0.1 for my brother's account (PTR), however, I found that the history didn't get imported.

All other elements for PTR (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) transferred ... though all "favicons" were stripped from the bookmarks. The previous places.sqlite was marked ".corrupt".

I downgraded to v3.6.17, installed the Sync extension, set up Sync accounts for JSR and PTR, and transferred both users' information. The full 90 days of history (with favicons) had returned for PTR.

When I then returned to v4.0.1, all was as before for JSR, but the history was still missing for PTR. I downloaded the synced information (it's on a screen after choosing "Reset Sync," which gave me qualms at first).

Finally, the history returned ... but only for the previous 30 days, in full. For each of the two months before that, only two token history entries remained. (All entries were stripped of favicons.)

So Sync got back the most recent 30 of the 90 days of PTR's history, which is what's used the most anyway, but not all of it. Apparently the syncing from v3.6, or the restoring under v4.0, truncated what could be saved.

Oh, yes: I saved the ".corrupt" places.sqlite file, along with other files from the same pre-v4.0 day, as saved by the Bookmark Backups extension. Just in case I find further notes about how to get the full 90 days of PTR history back.

Incidentally, the places.sqlite and cookies.sqlite are of variable lengths in v3.5/v3.6, changing with daily usage, but seem to be a larger fixed length for each in v4.0 - so it seems, short of massive new material being added, a fixed amount is set aside in the newer version for those files.

Marco Bonardo [:mak]: I sincerely hope you implement history backups soon, including the entries' favicons. It's long past time, with many of us relying on history searches for handling recent traffic, rather than just bookmarking everything in sight.