sync not working
Set up Sync on my desktop with the new sync platform. Never used any sync before this.
logged into sync on my laptop and discovered that nothing was syncing. Pressing 'sync now' does not appear to do anything. I don't get any errors, so I do not think there is something wrong my my connection to the sync service.
I wanted my bookmarks to migrate to my laptop, and they aren't. How do I fix this?
All Replies (8)
Hey,
Try setting up the new one :-)Sync your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords and more
I did use the new one.
Hi hypnotyk, Thank you for your response. It looks like there is a way to see is change live, but not currently in the interface. To do this:
- Open up about:config:In order to change your Firefox Configuration please In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
- Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
- Search for "sync"
- Click on the Tools menu and click "sync now"
You should see a timestamp change on the about:config page you have open. Please also make sure that the preferences on each of the computers has Bookmarks checked. If there are a large number of bookmarks, can you also provide the size of the places.sqlite file? Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data
So I am not sure how Sync is supossed to work, but it isn't helping me much at all. All it seems to do is delete everything.
I used to have bookmarks, add-ons, etc. Set up sync. I go to a new computer, set up sync, and nothing happens. Go back to the old computer, and when it sync's everything is gone.
In short, using sync wrecked years of saved bookmarks and I don't even see any way to recover them now. Would have been nice to maybe LET ME CHOOSE which session to sync.
It would be nice if a freshly installed browser didn't say "I'm the new baseline" when it was added to the sync - it would have been nicer if maybe it instead tried to sync itself with the profile that I had stored.
This is rather frustrating and I'm pretty unhappy with the "New Sync". The old one worked great. New one destroyed all my data.
Hi hypnotyk, I will be sure to ask that first next time. Maybe a warning is needed. I added a bug:
- Bug 1014078 - [User story] Request to add a warning when syncing a profile to an account with nothing
What is really frustrating is that there is no warning. I test new profiles all the time and save a back up of my multiple profiles, so I have a different use case. Using Multiple Profiles
Sync always merges data from new devices with the data on the server.
It explicitly doesn't delete anything from a device unless one of two things is true:
- There are records on the server with the same ID, marked as deleted. This only happens if you have a client that deletes a record and then syncs. This is the flow that's happening when you've deleted a bookmark on one machine and it disappears on the others.
- One of the devices has sent a wipe command to the others, or in Sync 1.1 you chose to wipe the local device during setup. This shouldn't be possible at all in the Firefox Account-based Sync, so I think we can rule it out in your case.
If it's just your bookmarks and history that have disappeared, the most likely scenario I can imagine is that there was coincidentally some corruption of your places.sqlite (the database that stores bookmarks and history), and for some reason Firefox couldn't automatically recover your bookmarks from a backup. That will appear to be a total wipe of your bookmarks and history.
If you also lost passwords, preferences, etc., then there are some other hypotheses, but Sync is a pretty unlikely source.
How are you verifying that "everything is gone"?
No bookmarks, no passwords, no history, preferences, add-ons.
My desktop install pretty much looked like a fresh install.
What I'm hearing is that all my stuff is gone (I'm mostly upset about years of misc bookmarks that will be quite difficult to recover) and there isn't anything to do to recover it..
This sounds like something else has occurred beyond any kind of bug in Sync: e.g., you accidentally triggered Reset Firefox, or you're using a new (or old) profile by mistake, or disk corruption trashed your profile directory, or you've hit some kind of very strange bug indeed.
The simplest thing for you to do is to recover your profile from your last dated backup — this is especially easy if you're on a Mac and using Time Machine, but it should be straightforward with every other backup tool.