Firefox 3.0.8
What a wonderful experience this was.
First, I'll make it clear that I don't have a memory. I don't even bother. So when things just "feel wrong", I get rather bothered because I can't think back to figure out what the heck is actually wrong with some kind of freakish photographic memory like Lord Nikon of Hackers - (1995 movie) can. Ugh, you know I'm pissed off when I hack together a clumsy sentence like that.
"Hey, didn't I bookmark a huge set of tabs?" .. *hunts around* .. "shit, did a Firefox crash wipe those changes?"
... time passes
"Hey, didn't I bookmark that thing about that stuff? .. *scratches head, can't remember anything about what was bookmarked*
... time passes
"Oh shit, is Firefox silently discarding my bookmarks?" .. *performs a test case*
...
"Yep. Damn, must be this new craptastic setup and some permission issues" .. *fiddles around* .. *performs a test case*
...
Nope. Hrm. Wonder if anyone's had this one happen to them. .. *Googles* .. "nope, must be some recent Add-ons" *tries firefox -safe-mode
* .. "nope, what the heck"
At that point I started playing around to see that there *were* some bookmarks files with all my stuff in there, and a set of backups, and none of it was being written to. That's just odd.
Wanna hazard a guess as to how I got that solved?
I moved all bookmarks out of firefox (/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile/bookmarkbackups
), and then using firefox I imported them. Yeah, it was that stupid.
I also found some other bookmark files in /user/.mozilla/firefox/profile/
.. the timestamps were from June 2008.
Ok, so it really REALLY pisses me off when data just silently vanishes. All of my bookmarking changes for I don't know how long has been wiped. It feels like only a couple of days, but I've been quite active and there were some significant todo-related bookmarks which will now be completely lost to time.
I don't expect to be able to re-review all user forum posts and development emails for the whole life of Unity Linux.
Sigh. Well hopefully I committed enough notes to the wiki, and the bookmarks that lingered around in Firefox weren't so important. Most of it was either required reading which I'll get reminded of eventually or it was outside blog bostings or other cool stuff, which isn't so important.
But really. An error message would have been nice. Even one of those fantastically nondescript "I hate you" error messages would have at least told me something was wrong, and to stop doing critical work to troubleshoot.