hebig.org/blog

The Mozilla Suite and its offsprings are mighty fine programs, I live in them as others live in Outlook or Notes, and just by using it while others watched, I made lots of people switch from their browser to a Gecko based one. But sometimes, I really hate it. It's not that the useless Smooth Scrolling is now enabled by default and you have to manually edit some files to disable it, or other tiny things. It's that sometimes, it freezes my machine and destroys its preference files, leaving me with no access to my email and my settings. This has happened the second time now, and it took quite a while to shoot trouble:

SITUATION
Mozilla Suite with Browser and Mail/News opened, Mail/News sitting in the background, some tabs opened in Browser - machine freezes - reboot - on restarting Mozilla, it does not find any profile and behaves like a fresh installation.

After navigating into my profile folder, I found out that basically all the important data was still there: the different mail and news files sitting in their folders, Password Manager, address book and all the other data sitting in their files. Mozilla didn't see this data because:

• for some of the files, new, empty ones were created, with the prior versions sometimes saved in backup files,
• panacea.dat, the mail folder cache, was corrupted and
• the all-important prefs.js was reset to its initial state, without a useful backup version to be found

SOLUTION
After some initial approaches failed, the slow and unelegant way of rebuilding a new profile from scratch and moving existing files from the old profile into it worked:

• Create a new profile
• Move the Password Manager data. Encrypted passwords are stored in [random_number].s. Just replacing the new .w-file with the new one did not work, so I opened both files in my text editor and copied the content of the old one into the new one - worked. The same should apply to saved form data files, [random_number].w
• Create new mail and news accounts. I created all the accounts that existed before again, resulting in one folder per account in the mail folder and account information added to prefs.js. I assume this should also work by adding those lines to prefs.js and creating those folders manually, but that's a bit too geeky and time-consuming for my taste. Then, I moved the some hundred Megabytes worth of mail from the old folders into the respective new ones and deleted the new panacea.dat cache from profile root. This worked fine as the files reflect your mail folders and filter rules. Do not forget to move training.dat found in the profile root, as this file holds the trained Bayesian spam filter data, and to configure your ougoing servers settings.
• Now move the remaining files from your old profile root to the new one, overwriting existing ones, and complete your prefs.js by going through Browser preferences (tabbed browsing, search, ...) and Mail/News preferences ("View - Message body as - Plain text" etc). Additional steps might be necessary for your skins and plugins.
• Back up your new profile

SOME FINAL NOTES
This happened with the 20030529 (Mozilla 1.5a) build on a Windows 2000 notebook. It happened before in September 2002, so the overall count of freezings and blue screens is up to about seven during the last two years, at least three of them caused by Mozilla. So clearly, I've seen less stable machines, but still, it's annoying. Having a Backup Strategy That Works^TM would have saved me a lot of time - for some reasons, it covered the mail files itself, but not the profile settings. Bummer, fixed. If you manually edit Mozilla profile files, exit the application completely before (make sure it doesn't still live in the tray if you use Quick Launch). Gemal.dk has a good annotated list of Files in your Mozilla profile directory, ZillaVilla is another interesting Mozilla resource I came across recently.