TEBE Lives! - Tech. Discussion & Bug reports

[cbaker_admin]

Gary, Do you want to handle Jay's problem? I know you put some debugging code in the last TEBE release. Maybe he can give you the trace.

[spaceShot9]

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the report. Please see as well. I suspect that this may have been the root of all evil.

Thanks.

[Jay]

Hello Gary:

Installed latest version (060412) and cleared old preferences. Set-Up my preferences again. Ran a backup and the same bug initially appeared. I then decided to Check the "Display the Results Page" under the HOW TO BACKUP TAB and ran another backup. FINALLY WORKED BEAUTIFULLY!

I then UNCHECKED "DIsplay Results Page" and everything now works fine!! Backup is fast and Progress window Now terminates like it is suppose to after indicating that it is "Preparing the Results Page."

Nice Work THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

Jay

[spaceShot9]

Hi Jay,

Excellent news, thanks. I can't explain why you experienced that behaviour surrounding the report but I think we're getting back on track, now.

Cheers.

[Malachi]

Wonderful to see TEBE resurrected (has been a while since I checked it out). I installed the 20120604 version... and I have a bug: it says it keeps running, but I'm sure it's done. I thought this had to do with the results page, but after turning it on and off the problem persists. I turned it back on to see if it would go away (I thought it went away when I turned it on before).
This happens when I have the backup scheduled (it's a selective backup, but it has everything minus the user-defined backups)..

So... to make a long story short (or a bit longer..): the clock on the right bottom of thunderbird just keeps blinking (so the backup keeps running), even when it's done (afaik). Is there a solution for this bug?

[spaceShot9]

[Malachi]

The blinking clock is indeed the circular TEBE icon. It blinks when it does the daily backup and it just keeps blinking, which is distracting. I also don't get a results page I believe...(sorry, it's been a while.. I just try to remember to click on the TEBE icon to do a backup)
Thanks.

[Jay]

Hello Again Gary:

The issue of Tebe getting stuck at the "preparing result page" has been occurring again as I described a few posts above.

Whether you Check or Uncheck 'Display Results Page" the issue occurs. The backup is performed, but Tebe never closes. A window remains opened with a preparing results page message. You then have to manually abort Tebe to shut this window. When I check the folder that I saved the backup to, the backup files are there. This occurs wheter you schedule or manually run Tebe.

[DavidFB]

On Win7 in TB 15.01, TEBE installed fine and backed up as selected, where selected. (I had to fiddle a little with selections to get the result I wanted but otherwise fine - like selecting Both)

However, I shortly noticed the system was sluggish and running hard. Task Manager told me TB was using 25% of all 4 CPUs. I disabled the extension and restarted - all was fine again.

[cbaker_admin]

How long was TEBE hogging the CPUs? If you have the "Run asynchronously" box checked (TEBE options > How to backup), the actual backup code will run in the background and eat CPU cycles for several seconds (or more depending on how large the backup files are). When in asynchronous mode, the backup will continue to run until it is done even after the backup report is displayed.

[Sandman]

Gary, after waiting & hoping for soooo long that TEBE would be resurrected, I had finally given up hope. Then I happened to run across this thread, and I am soooo grateful that you picked up the ball and ran with it. THANKS!!

Are you aware that a search on the Thunderbird add-on site finds TEBE missing in action? I'm sure that former TEBE users, & new users would be just as happy, relieved, & grateful to discover that it is alive, well, & available, though I imagine that it will take some time for them to discover it there. For my usage, it is working perfectly. If you haven't already, please upload it. Thanks Chuck for creating TEBE, and thanks again Gary for resurrecting and maintaining it.

[notto]

backuping huge profiles creates nonstandard zip file (>4gig zip)

having a huge problem with tebe.

just recently, i moved from windowsxp-32bit firefox with febe just nicely over to win7-64bit
the fbu file of febe was 260megabytes, all went fine

then i tried to tackle thunderbird on the same winxp 32bit machine, and the resulting tbu file was still 6+gigabytes in size, the original profile was over 9gigabytes on the local disk

i transferred the tbu file over to the win7 64bit machine and installed tebe into default first profile of thunderbird, and tried to make it restore the tbu file/profile from it to a newly created additional thunderbird profile. it never did anything besides animating the restore window bar.

first I had thought that the new tb profile needed to be executed/started at least one time, as the profiledirectory was simply empty, and no default thunderbird profile files and subdirectories were present.

then i decided to delete this profile and create one separately newly with thunderbird.exe -prolfilemanager
and start into it at least one time

thunderbird created about 15megabyte of files and subfolders as default into it.

then i went back to first default profile with tebe and selected the tbu file again and told it to restore to that second profile
i checked in the dosbox/cmd and saw, that the default 15megabytes were gone as soon as the animation restore window was running, so thunderbird/tebe did do something in that profile directory. so far so good.

then i used processexplorer and processmonitor (and similar tools, e.g.by sysinternals/microsoft) to check what thunderbird app was doing with files and so on.

i figured that it indeed loaded and checked the 6+gigabyte tbu file but closed it simply right away after it and then never did anything meaningful again only thunderbird.exe was working some true type fonts or so from windows fonts directory. i left it running an hour or two but it never went anyway (restore animation window)

oh, and yes, I know about all this dom script timeout values and all in about:config, that is not the issue here

so eventually i tried to check with 7zip (or any zipper at all) the created tbu file (as its supposed to be in zip standard)
7zip could open the file and list filenames and directory contents, also compression algorithm and whole archive size and compression ration and all. but when 7zip tried to test the tbu archive or extract anything or whatever, it complained for all and every file, that compression algorithm wasnt supported.

then i tried 7zip to check the firefox backup file .fbu, that was only 260megabytes. 7zip could view the file and its contents and also check the archive and extract stuff fromit. as i said before the firefox migration backup/restore scenario from winxp32bit to win7x64 went just fine as I am using my migrated firefox instance to write here into the forum.

so I compared the 7zip displayed information of the fbu and tbu file, and both look very similar, as they only use the deflate achiving standard that has been defined ages ago for the zip standard and unix encoding style or so, I am not that expert in this stuff.

then it came to my mind the infamous hugefile trouble in all kind of operating systems and libraries in the past decades. I think I remember that the original zip fileformat was never intended for files larger than 4gigabyte or even only 2gigabytes. only at a later time zip (pkzip? or winzip folks or some group or standardising associations and folks) were extending zip fileformat to go beyond 32bit filesizes and more, aes encryption, zip splitting into multiple volumes and so on.

so to make this story short, I have really a huge thunderbird profile as raw files on disk already 9+gigabytes, and the tebe tries to pack/zip it into the tbu file and still leaves it at 6+gigabytes.

apparently the packing into zip fileformat uses the ancient classic original old zipfileformat and messes up the archive and creates nonstandard nondefault incompatible zipfile that is beyond the standards and specifications

no zipper can read this file properly, as there is also probably bufferoverflows or tags and flags out of boundary and out of allowed values and impossible variable values and all that.

so how are we gonna backup/restore handling huge firefox/thunderbird profiles that go beyond the limits of zip filesizes?
can anyone solve this trouble really quickly by going for newer zipfile formats, or even using better format such as 7zip native format or rar? probably 7zip format would be best, but I dont know if these extensions such as tebe/febe would then need object code and dll or libaries to be able to use 7zip algorithm or how the stuff with zipping is currently realized? is tebe/febe using mozilla api to call a zipping function and routine, or does the extension supply some machine/object code to do its own zipping?

any help possible here, or do I have to try mozbackup, although I wonder if mozbackup is still compatible with my thunderbird 16.0.x (also firefox 16.0.x) at all, as I see hardly any updates of mozbackup any more on their pages, forums or blog. also if mozbackup would be able to handle this huge datasize as it also creates its own packed file, and I think they also use zip, as I can remember of looking into mozbackup backup files with 7zip, wondering if they use default old zip fileformat as well or if they can handle newer zip mechanisms of larger than 32bit files?

other than that I suppose I need to copy/move my files from winxp thunderbird manually to win7x64bit and mess with prefs.js and all that crap, path strings in those config files and more.

is there maybe a workaround possible, in generating MULTIPLE zip files (tbu/fbu) when those files reach the 2gigabyte or 4gigabyte limits when backuping/restoring profiles?

any helpful insight here? thanks for listening and reading. many regards.

[notto]

did some research on zipfileformat limits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_%28fil ... %29#Limits

Limits

The minimum size of a zip file is 22 bytes.

The maximum size for both the archive file and the individual files inside it is 4,294,967,295 bytes (232−1 bytes, or 4 GiB) for standard ZIP, and 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 bytes (264−1 bytes, or 16 EiB) for ZIP64

http://www.artpol-software.com/ZipArchi ... 51629.aspx

[cbaker_admin]

FEBE/TEBE use the built-in XPCOM component to create the backup archives. Before that was available (pre-Fx 3), FEBE did use 7zip, but that was a messy process. FEBE had to create individual batch files and execute them sequentially in a DOS or terminal shell. It was slow, ugly, and not very efficient.

Mozilla's documentation on nsIZipWriter doesn't mention anything about file size limits, nor does show any reported bugs concerned with file size.

Since there does not appear to be any quick fix for your problem, perhaps you might be able to decrease the size of your . Have you tried clearing your Junk and Trash folders? Compacting your message folders could save a lot of space (File > Compact Folders). And if you're like me, you tend to forget to clean out the Sent folder of ancient email messages and forgotten forwards.

[notto]

I dont have junk or trash obviously I came a very long way with thunderbird and I have lots of folder and mails, over many years now. If you guys are using some internal mozilla api then there should be some setting regarding to zip vs zip64 fileformat, as described and given in that artpol software link. old zipfiles have this 32bit filesizelimit, and if we need to go above 4gigabytes we need to create multiple zip if possible or use zip64bit newer fileformat. can you guys ask the mozilla people on this matter or file for a bugreport at their bugzilla or bring some movement into this matter?

this will effect everyone who is using thunderbird as a poweruser and not only as a little toy but using mails heavily and over a long time.
thanks for all your help and efforts in this matter.