How to disable Firefox bookmarkbackups ?

[lim...@hotmail.com]

My Firefox 1.5 RC1 version (on WinXP) makes backups of my bookmarks in
a <Profile Folder>\bookmarkbackups. It seems that it makes daily
backups.
Since I'm smart enough to make my own backups I want to get rid of this
disk-wasting functionality. Does anyone know how ?

[gwtc]

lim...@hotmail.com wrote:

are you sure its FF thats doing it and not an extension that you've
installed?

[Matt Nordhoff]

It's a behavior of Firefox 1.5.
--
Replace the point in my email address with a period to reply. ;-)

[Matt Nordhoff]

Vote for bug 307135 [1].

In the meantime, I've made the bookmarkbackups/ directory read-only. It
used to crash if it couldn't read the directory (bug 313990 [1] ;-) ),
but having it just not able to write to it works fine (and that should
now anyway).

[1] <URL:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307135>
[2] <URL:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313990>

[lim...@hotmail.com]

Thanks Matt, I gave it my vote !

[Ron Hunter]

I would much prefer that this function be made an option, especially
since I have an extension that backs up much more than just my
bookmarks, but as for disk wasting, I think that is probably just a
hangover from the days of small disk drives. With built-in drives
running from 160 to 250 GB these days, how long would it take to get
significant disk space taken up by backing up just bookmarks?

Given the loss of bookmarks is the most frequent complaint in the
Firefox newsgroup, I can see why the feature was implemented.
I do feel that putting the backup in the same directory as the original
detracts from its usefulness.

--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net

[lim...@hotmail.com]

> I would much prefer that this function be made an option, especially
> since I have an extension that backs up much more than just my
> bookmarks, but as for disk wasting, I think that is probably just a
> hangover from the days of small disk drives. With built-in drives
> running from 160 to 250 GB these days, how long would it take to get
> significant disk space taken up by backing up just bookmarks?

This may apply to regular home users, but corporate users or those that
store documents and application settings (such as mozilla profiles) on
a server in a home network may think different.

My profile folder size is below 1 Mb (also because I zeroized the
XUL.mfl file, another misfeature when using mozilla profiles over a
network).
However, since it seems FF makes daily backups, I calculated that the
size of my bookmarkbackups folder will be over 80 Mb within a year.
Ridiculous!
This highly depends on the size of your bookmarks of course.

Indeed desktop harddisks are big these days, though this applies less
to laptops.
And what about corporate users, which usually have the disposal of
about 100-200 Mb "backupped" server space...

By the way, setting my bookmarkbackups directory to read-only doesn't
help for me, FF just keeps creating daily copies of my bookmarks. I'm
using Windows. Matt, are you using Linux perhaps ?

[harry]

You should now, that the number of backups is limited to 4 (in 1.5).
So spaces probably isn't the problem.

Harry

[Matt Nordhoff]

On 11/13/05 15:15, lim...@hotmail.com wrote:
>> I would much prefer that this function be made an option, especially
>> since I have an extension that backs up much more than just my
>> bookmarks, but as for disk wasting, I think that is probably just a
>> hangover from the days of small disk drives. With built-in drives
>> running from 160 to 250 GB these days, how long would it take to get
>> significant disk space taken up by backing up just bookmarks?
>
> This may apply to regular home users, but corporate users or those that
> store documents and application settings (such as mozilla profiles) on
> a server in a home network may think different.
>
> My profile folder size is below 1 Mb (also because I zeroized the
> XUL.mfl file, another misfeature when using mozilla profiles over a
> network).
> However, since it seems FF makes daily backups, I calculated that the
> size of my bookmarkbackups folder will be over 80 Mb within a year.
> Ridiculous!
> This highly depends on the size of your bookmarks of course.

It only keeps five backups. ;-)

> Indeed desktop harddisks are big these days, though this applies less
> to laptops.
> And what about corporate users, which usually have the disposal of
> about 100-200 Mb "backupped" server space...
>
> By the way, setting my bookmarkbackups directory to read-only doesn't
> help for me, FF just keeps creating daily copies of my bookmarks. I'm
> using Windows. Matt, are you using Linux perhaps ?

Yes, I am, but if it can't write to the directory, it shouldn't be able
to make backups to it on any OS.

[Matt Nordhoff]

Five, not four.