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Double-check to disable Firefox Sync when doing a regression test to not loose important profile data

Yesterday I was doing a regression test for Firefox to determine the changeset which brought in a very annoying behavior into Aurora builds. Therefore I copied my profile to not destroy my original profile data, and was working on that copy. All was working fine and I was able to reduce the whole profile to only the sessionstore.js and prefs.js files.

The evil awakening came today morning when I tried to log into a website via my personal profile. By surprise the user name and password hasn’t been filled in automatically, and a check for the saved passwords have revealed that NONE are stored anymore! All were gone forever.

After some thoughts I figured out that sync was the problem here, because I missed to disconnect it in the copied profile. So after I have deleted the signons.sqlite and other files it also removed all the information from my sync account, which got distributed to all my other machines too. So on each of them the passwords are gone.

And if that isn’t bad enough, the backup tool on my Ubuntu machine had a hick-up lately and deleted all the old backup files on the backup drive. Not sure how that have come, but with that I completely lost all my stored passwords, and other synced data. 🙁

So a warning for everyone who is doing regression tests for Firefox and has Sync enabled: Please do NOT forget to disconnect Sync for the testing profile and double-check that it has been turned off.

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