Pike's Mozilla Firefox Extensions

Unless Deer Park is going to be able to backup other files besides just the bookmarks, then it won't truly be a replacement for BB.

I haven't been following all of the new features coming in 1.5, so I wasn't aware of that one. Obviously you're much closer to the process. Any thoughts on that?

@akahige

Deer Park currently backs up just bookmarks, but Firefox very rarely loses any other type of file and there are better alternatives for whole profile backup (e.g. MozBackup - http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/).

I'll wait to see what happens post-Fx 1.5, if people are still installing Bookmark Backup at that point then I'll continue developing it.

I don't know if I use BB differently than other people, though perhaps I may use it FOR different reasons. In all of the years that I've been using Fire* products, and all the years I used various incarnations of Netscape, I've never had an issue with bookmark corruption. Maybe I've just been lucky all this time.

Firefox has issues with general profile corruption. Things just go bad over time, and everything ceases to work the way it's supposed to. It's these moments that I turn to Bookmark Backup because I know *when* everything went all pear-shaped and (generally speaking) which backup set I need to pull to get myself back on track. (This is one of the reasons that I've always been eager to have a more flexible time range; I would love to have a set of backups organized by date.)

The "problem" with MozBackup -- and I don't mean that in a negative way -- is that it's ANOTHER program (which also happens to be Windows only). I don't want to have to install an entirely different application to deal with an issue that could just as easily be handled inside of the Firefox "universe," any more than I want to have to install a bunch of extra extensions to do essentially the same thing.

I hope you'll keep with BB. It's a great extension and from the comments I've seen, there seem many happy users who rely on it.

Pike,

Firefox recently dumped all my favorites, settings etc as it seems to do every 2 or 3 months or so, I atttempted to do a full restore of favorites settings, etc, but it was rather problemmatic. At first it wouldn't allow firefox to start at all, would just hang, then i tried to restore individual components one by one, starting with bookmarks. That copied over easy enough, all my bookmarks were restored perfectly, however restoring firefox settings seems rather buggy, I noticed that when i tried to restore my history it caused firefox to crash, when i un-restored the history, firefox would then start up as normal. Also, I tried to restore the prefs.js file, I'm assuming that's my preferences, and it failed to restore, the settings were reverted to default preferences. Firefox is cool, but I really don't like having to re-do all my customizations and extensions every 2 or 3 months or so, just not very efficient, makes me want to not go through the trouble of advanced customizations knowing that it will all be lost at some point not too far down the road, what a bummer. Guess I'll just keep plodding along, maybe go back to regular mozilla browser even though I don't like it as much at least it doesn't dump all the settings every 2-3 months like firefox always does. Anyway, i don't have much time to go into great detail for advanced troubleshooting of these issues, but just letting you know that at least for me the favorites function works fine, but the settings/customization feature appears to have a few bugs that need working out...

Just noticed moz backup, maybe i'll give that a whirl. Any idea why firefox seems to lose my bookmarks, setting every 2 or 3 months or so??? it is fairly regular, has happened to me at least four or five times now. Never had this problem w/ regular mozilla or when I used IE.

pike,

how do you restore extensions??? I tried overwriting the new extensions folder with the backed up version, but it didn't work, all my extensions and extension customizations are lost.

what about passwords, is it possible to restore these?? which file is it? I thought it was formhistory, signons or cookies, but none of these seem to work, all passwords have been lost too it seems.

@paul

I have no idea why Firefox loses your settings, "unfortunately" this issue is rare enough that it doesn't seem to happen to Firefox developers and testers, that makes it hard to know exactly what happens.

If you have any insight into what actually happens I'd be interested to hear it, e.g. did your whole profile folder just disappear, or just some files, or do the files still exist but Firefox no longer recognizes them, did you get any warnings, etc.?

As for why you can't restore prefs.js, the only reasons I can think of why it would fail are either a) Firefox is still running when you restore it or b) you're copying it to the wrong place. Is it possible you copied your backups to your default profile ("C:\Program Files\Firefox\defaults\profile\") and not your real profile (http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile#locate)?

You can restore passwords by copying the files signons.txt and key3.db into your new profile.

Restoring your extensions would require you to restore at least the chrome and extensions folders and probably some other files as well, I have no experience of it though. Extension settings are stored in prefs.js along with Firefox settings.

Just to say, I think it would be a better idea to keep a list of the extensions you have installed and maybe download the XPIs and reinstall them when everything goes to hell instead of trying to restore them from backups. Though it should go okay to copy over the different files extensions have, like how Popup Count has popupcount.dat and Greasemonkey has the gm_scripts directory. Use your best judgment. :)

YESSSSS!!!!!!!! I had this on my old computer, then had to do a re-format. Went searching for this again afterward, and it couldn't be found.

Now, here it is, I just installed it onto my laptop, and will put it on the rest of the PC's in the house ASAP.

Pike, as a tried & true user of BB, THANK YOU for this little app. I'm so glad to have found it again.

I HATE losing all my bookmarks, but ti seems to happen just like folks above have stated-every 2 or 3 months. What a pain!!!

I have found that only recently (the past year), has Firefox seems to somehow reset itself and loses all of my bookmarks.

At first I thought it might software that I may be installing, but it seems pretty random when it happens, but it seems every three to four months for me.

I love Firefox, but the lost bookmarks are getting to be a bit of a pain. Especially to restore. I don't use any profiles, in fact I don't use the profile manager at all. Just one user on the pc. On my Mac it doesn't seem to happen at all, but then I don't surf the net on Mac as often. The pc is the family machine.

I think this is really a windows Firefox problem, even though they don't see it.

Kenny: You do use a profile, even if you only use one and have never opened the Profile Manager. Maybe you have bad memory? (RAM, not your brain.)

....Hey, did Bookmark Backup originally only back up bookmarks?

@Matt

Yes.

Just wanted to say, out of the 20 or so extensions I have installed, this is my favorite by far because of the amount of grief it has saved me. I keep a massive bookmark file, but a lot of customizations stored in the other files as well. Twice in the last month, there has been some corruption in my profile causing Firefox to start in a default state (possibly a shutdown/cache flush issue). Both times, all the settings files seem to get hit at once (bookmarks, user.js, hostperm.1, mimeTypes.rdf. prefs.js, localstore.rdf, ...), but it was a great relief to find the very recent backups by this extension. If 1.5 does not cover fully the functionality of it, I really hope you continue updating it (if there is anywhere to donate a few bucks, I'd be glad to).

Just a trick I fell upon by accident I wanted to share:
If you change the backup location to something other than the default (under "Custom location"), you might be able to recover more recent backups if you run into my situation:
Normally, this extension will overwrite the same day's previous backup, so if you open FF, notice corrupted bms or settings, but then close FF, you have just overwritten a possibly good set of backups with a corrupt or default one and have to use the previous day. In my case, all the settings files were gone too, so this extension reverted to using the default path for backups. I just looked at my custom location, and the last backups from that day were untouched ie not overwritten.

In 1.5 Beta 1, I tried using BB to back up extensions, and it worked. It backed up extensions and themes, it seems they're in one subfolder in the 1.5 profile. Dropped the backup into a new profile, everything worked. I basically created a cloned profile using BB.

@greenknight

Yeah, in Fx 1.5 the extensions folder no longer relies on the chrome folder like it did in 1.0, plus all stored paths are now relative instead of absolute.

The Fx 1.5 extension system is much better than the one that shipped with Fx 1.0, hopefully people will no longer have so many extension problems (plus like you said, you can now just copy your extension folder to a new profile and Fx will do the right thing).

You planning to add an Extensions checkbox, after the 1.5 release?

@greenknight

The only thing I'm worried about is someone with tons of extensions and themes installed might have a huge extensions folder. That could cause shutdown issues if it takes a long time to make the copy.