Philipp von Weitershausen: Bookmark sync issues

We’ve been getting a lot of reports from users about bookmark sync being somewhat unreliable in Sync 1.6 and Firefox 4.0b8. Symptoms include duplicate bookmarks, erroneous re-ordering and bookmarks occasionally being moved to the Unsorted Bookmarks folder. We’re trying hard to track down these issues, but since they appear seemingly randomly, we’re mostly poking in the dark.

How to fix

Fortunately, Sync makes backups of your bookmarks before each sync. So if your bookmarks have been messed up, you can easily restore from bookmarks. Simply go to the Bookmarks menu and choose Show All Bookmarks (Organize Bookmarks on Firefox 3.x). In the window that opens, click on the Import and Backup button in the toolbar (it’s a star icon on OS X) and open the Restore submenu. It will give you the option to restore your bookmarks to a previous state.

How to help us

If you’re one of the affected users and would like to help us track down this issue, here’s what you can do:

1. Let’s say you have computer A and computer B. On both computers, enable the sync log (about:sync-log) by going to about:config and setting the services.sync.log.appender.debugLog.enabled preference to true. In addition to that please make the log for bookmarks extra chatty by setting the services.sync.log.logger.engine.bookmarks preference to Trace. Make sure to restart the browser after making these changes.
2. Now on computer A, restore your bookmarks to a good state using the above steps. Then choose Reset Sync under Sync Options and choose the Replace all other devices options.
3. On computer B simply sync and observe whether you’re seeing any of the symptoms again. If you do, please send us your logs from both computers. They’re at about:sync-log and about:sync-log.1. You can just save those files and attach them to a new bug. Note that those logs will contain your bookmark data, so if you’re concerned about privacy, we completely understand. In that case feel free to send your logs to philikon@mozilla.com.

Please be assured that we’re trying hard to fix these problems and we’re looking forward to your help. Thanks for bearing with us and apologies if you’ve been affected.