On May 3, a very odd thing happened to me. My computer, which is usually very stable, crashed when I closed Firefox. I wasn’t concerned at that time, but the next day I noticed that it had lost my History file. This wasn’t a big deal, but it meant that I had to type in the entire URL of websites that I go to frequently, which I’m used to having auto-complete for me (I only have to type “c” to get to this site). I’ve memorized most of the addresses that I visit regularly, so it was just a minor inconvenience.
Today I decided to do something that I don’t do every day: I checked my Bookmarks. I don’t bookmark websites that I visit frequently because I don’t need to. Websites that I visit frequently can be accessed by typing between 1 and 3 letters into the address bar until auto-complete brings up the one I want! No, I use Bookmarks to bookmark my infrequently visited sites. (This is the part where this post becomes relevant to gaming.) I host a website called Classic DOS Games (you’re visiting it right now), which is an archive of hundreds of classic games. To include them on the site, I have to be sure that they are original, unaltered archives. They can’t be cracked, hacked, hex-edited, or have added or missing files. There are very few internet sources that I trust to meet this standard. Every once in a while I find a hidden gem of a website that is devoted to a specific game or genre or company, which contains invaluable information and rare downloads. When I come across these gems, I bookmark them in case I ever need to find them again.
So, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Firefox lost my bookmarks! I spent years finding these unknown treasures, and I could never find them again. I wouldn’t even remember which sites were missing! It took me five days to notice, but the consequences took less than 5 milliseconds to sink in. My first reaction was to exclaim, quite loudly, “I’m @&$^ed!”
It had never occurred to me to backup my bookmarks because I couldn’t imagine something like this happening. In fact, I still don’t understand how it could. NTFS is a very robust, recoverable file system. If the system turns off during a write operation, the file is never damaged. For one thing, the file isn’t replaced until the write operation is complete. Even if the file was damaged, NTFS stores two copies of the file allocation table at opposite “ends” of the hard drive (the innermost and outermost tracks). After an improper shutdown, the two copies are compared. If the primary copy is corrupted, it is restored from the backup. Any entries with mismatched CRCs can be repaired by knowing the correct CRC. The short version of what I’m saying is that Windows didn’t lose my bookmarks, Firefox did. Somewhere in the code, it must be non-fault tolerant to an improper shutdown while it’s saving the History and Bookmark files.
I was dismayed for a few seconds, but then I decided to do a Google search for “Firefox lost my bookmarks”. The first site that came up was http://splashofstyle.com/archives/2007/05/06/firefox-lost-my-bookmarks/. I can see from the long list of thank you notes under the article that I’m not the only person affected by this. The step-by-step instructions missed two steps, which I’ve inserted in bold.
1. In the My Computer directory/folder, choose the C: Drive.
2. Choose the Documents and Settings folder;
3. Then your user folder (what ever your user name is, there will be a folder for it)
4. Next, Application Data folder
4a. Choose Mozilla
5. Choose Firefox
6. Then choose the Profiles folder.
7. After selecting the profile you want to check, if the bookmarks.html file is empty (it probably will be), go to bookmarkbackups.
Splash of Style correctly predicts that you will likely have at least two profiles when you get here. One of them is your original profile (the one you lost), and the other one was created to replace it. The bookmarks.html file in the new one will be 7k, and will contain only the default bookmarks that you have when you first install Firefox. The bookmarks.html file in the other folder will be 1k and will not have any bookmarks in it! Go into a folder called bookmarkbackups, where Firefox stores backups of your bookmarks going back five days.
Ack! Five days! It took me five days to notice! I almost never use my bookmarks, and it was just dumb luck (or divine intervention) that I happened to go into them today. In the bookmarkbackups folder were five files: four empty files dated May 4, 5, 6, and 7, and one dated May 3 which had all of my bookmarks in it. If I had waited one more day, I would have lost them. Years of research would have been lost, and I likely would never have recovered all of my sources. That was close.
So, first of all, my sincerest thanks to debbieT of Splash of Style for saving my butt today. We all know that we should backup our valuable data, but it probably hasn’t occurred to most of us to backup a list of our important bookmarks. As I said, I don’t understand how Firefox could lose them! I would be even more screwed if I were to lose my emails, which is why I used to export my emails to a second hard drive, in addition to an off-site backup using secure online storage, on a regular basis. With Outlook Express this is incredibly easy.
In Outlook Express, select File>Export>Messages. Then just follow along and the rest is obvious. What could be easier than that? Importing is just as easy. The whole process can take less than a minute. O sweet simplicity, O well-designed interface! You are a rare treasure, a pearl of great price! Unfortunately, I switched to Thunderbird about a year ago because Outlook Express wasn’t handling certified emails very well. Where is the Export Messages function of Thunderbird? There isn’t one!
No, I’m not kidding! There isn’t one. Prove me wrong! I selected Mozilla Thunderbird Help and it took me to a website where I eventually found this explanation of how to locate the folder where my profile is stored on my hard drive so that it can be backed up manually. Apparently this critical function wasn’t considered important enough to become a feature of Thunderbird. (???) I used to be reminded to do it every time I clicked the File menu in Outlook Express. When I started using Thunderbird, I stopped thinking about it and put my last year’s worth of emails at risk.
So, the lesson today is that you should always backup your emails and your bookmarks. Some programs make this easy, and others force you to do it the hard way. Either way, just do it, and do it often.
As for Mozilla: you know I love you guys, but both of your flagship products need some work. Thunderbird has a simple function for importing messages, but not for exporting or backing them up. That’s unacceptable. Thank you very much for building backups into Firefox, but my bookmarks shouldn’t have been lost in the first place, and once they were, 5 days almost wasn’t enough to save them. Here’s a very simple suggestion: bookmarks-2008-05-03.html contains dozens of bookmarks, and bookmarks-2008-05-04.html contains none. It’s possible that I deleted all of my bookmarks, but probably not likely. If Firefox detects that all of the bookmarks in a profile have disappeared since the last time Firefox was used, or from one backup to the next, maybe it could alert the user? It’s very important that programs perform a self-check every time they run. Yes, it slows down the startup process, but it’s too important to skip. Firefox should check the integrity of the bookmark list at startup every time. I came within 24 hours of losing my lifetime collection of bookmarks.
