A cautionary tale
Of course we all back everything up regularly don't we? Even so, it didn't quite occur to me to back up Firefox passwords on a regular basis. After all, it's a nice stable program - what can go wrong?
Well I found out yesterday. In the process of dealing with the overnight email, I flicked over to Firefox to check on a couple of details, and straight away it looked completely different. The was no tool bar, no bookmarks bar, or anything really familiar. In fact all I was offered was a "Let's get started with Firefox" screen ....
I was about to discover that none of my bookmarks were available anywhere; the saved logins, cookies, and history were gone too, along with the installed add-ons. It appeared that overnight somehow, the profile data had been corrupted - still not sure how or why - it seems that if the program can't find a previously valid profile dataset during startup, it creates a new one.
I discovered a profile folder which co-incided with the previous evening's shut down time, but I could not get it to be recognised. All the files therein were saved, and then copied into a profile folder newly created and named, but it refused to co-operate. After a couple of hours of this stuff, I realised that in the end it was easier to salvage the bookmarks from another computer which gets used less often but still had a mostly current set of most used sites. The saved passwords and cookies will be re-installed with ongoing usage, and reference to the hard copy list.
How did it happen? That's something I'm still somewhat worried about. SS HDD starting to fail? Apparently not. I ran the supplied manufacturer's maintenance program and it reported a happy device, 100% life remaining, 68% used, 583 days of operation and 14,008 hours of 'power on' operation (that was surprising!).
The moral of the story? Backups are worth the effort.
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