Ouch! Bad Sync

One of my favorite Firefox extensions I have been using for a year and a half is called Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that keeps your different Firefox installs all updated with the same set of bookmarks. For me there is nothing more frustrating than not having that one cool link you saved on your computer at home and for the life of me, can't remember how or where I got it to begin with.

Well as you probably guessed from the title, I had an issue with it today. Something went wrong. I fired up a copy of Firefox I run for Windows from my USB drive (as corporate IT does not allow it to be installed on company machines. You can find this and many more "Portable Apps" you can install to removable media at PortableApps.com.) So something looked different when I had Firefox open. This was a second time I had started Firefox within 20 minutes and everything was fine the first time as I even used my bookmarks that first session. This second session opened Firefox in a half vertical screen top to bottom. I then maximized it and then noticed something was missing under my icons... no personal bookmark links. I thought maybe it was in full screen... nope. Maybe I turned them off... nope. Then all of a sudden Foxmarks pops up a message saying my sync is much smaller than the last save and suggested going to their Wiki for help.

Naturally there isn't much they can do to help but offer suggestions on how to recover the damage before it spread to your other machines. One such suggestion that I have used in the past is to rename a backup copy of your bookmarks to the current. Firefox does this automagically so you don't have to. This time I chose another route saving myself from lost synchronizations by firing up Firefox in my Linux VM image and immediately uploading my current bookmarks before it downloaded others. Simply put this worked great.

Question now is what the heck happened?! The personal bookmarks were gone but there were some other bookmarks there under the normal Bookmark pulldown menu that were non default. They were my bookmarks, just some very dated ones; possibly an ancient backup version I had on disk. I would assume this was a result of a botched sync attempt or previous session close.

I still suggest using Foxmarks if you use more than one install/machine. It does work well and offers secure login/transmissions. They also offer you to use your own server. It requires either FTP or WebDAV. They suggest using WebDAV as they say it's faster and offers more features they support. For me... I don't know a thing about WebDAV yet so I continue to just use them.