676632 - Add command line option to disable Sync temporarily

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement)

Description

[ael]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0a2) Gecko/20110804 Firefox/7.0a2
Build ID: 20110804042002

Steps to reproduce:

When sync data on the server is corrupted, running any device/profile which connects to that sync account will propagate the problem. 

In such a situation, one would like to run a profile which has uncorrupted data (e.g. from a backup) and then replace the sync data on the server via 'Reset Sync'. 

However, when starting up FF with the uncorrupted profile, Sync may already connect and download the corrupted entries, and there is currently no way to disable this. A command line option would help in such an (admittedly rare) circumstance.

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

You can achieve this already: "deactivate this device" on the good machine, then set up Sync again and choose what you want to happen in Sync Options. 

Still, the RFE stands.

Comment 2

[ael]

Yes - you can deactivate the device - but only when FF is already up and running. If you restore the entire profile from a backup, the device will no longer be deactivated, right?

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Yes - you can deactivate the device - but only when FF is already up and
> running. If you restore the entire profile from a backup, the device will no
> longer be deactivated, right?

Correct, but you can deactivate the device in offline mode.

Comment 4

[ael]

To add: I got around the problem by removing the synced data with an entirely clean profile as an intermediate step, so there are workarounds.

Comment 5

[ael]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Correct, but you can deactivate the device in offline mode.

But there is no command-line option for starting up in offline mode either.

Comment 6

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to comment #5)

> But there is no command-line option for starting up in offline mode either.

Pull the cable out? :)

Comment 7

[ael]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Pull the cable out? :)

Touché :)

Comment 8

[ael]

To rephrase the issue (having had to follow this circuitous route twice in two days now): Restoring one's profile from a backup is a headache when one suspects the data on the sync server is corrupted.

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I don't think this is especially useful.  There is a purge option available via the account panel at account.services.mozilla.com which addresses this particular problem.

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I just ran into this out of a problem entirely not related to the server...  I had a laptop run out of disk space, and the file that Firefox managed to not completely write out to disk was my password store, thus losing all of my saved passwords.  Sync happily propagated the delete of all of these passwords to all of my other devices.  Because I couldn't find a way to get sync to not sync on a device that hadn't launched yet since the corruption happened, I ended up having to snag the signons.sqlite and key3.db files out of that profile and replacing them again after sync did its thing before forcing a sync reset.

Comment 11

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Dave Miller [:justdave] from comment #10)
> I just ran into this out of a problem entirely not related to the server... 
> I had a laptop run out of disk space, and the file that Firefox managed to
> not completely write out to disk was my password store, thus losing all of
> my saved passwords.  Sync happily propagated the delete of all of these
> passwords to all of my other devices.

That would be really unlikely. Simply removing the data from the database does not count as a deletion.

Sync on desktop relies on observer notifications to track deletions; the only way it would propagate some missing records is if you relaunched Firefox and the login manager waited fifteen seconds (because Sync isn't running for the first ten seconds), then sent a pile of deletion notifications. That doesn't happen.

Sync also completely ignores bulk deletions, so these would need to be individual removeLogin calls.

The only way in which a wipe like this would occur is if "Reset Sync > Replace Others" occurred, or Sync otherwise decided that it needed to 'rescue' the server, but there doesn't seem to be any indication of that happening.

Comment 12

[Lina Butler (ex-Mozilla)]

I don't think we'll be adding this option. As Richard suggests in comment 6, disconnecting from the network, then disconnecting from Sync, is an easier workaround for most folks than figuring out how to add a command line option to launch Firefox.