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View Full Version : I just lost three hours of work in Firefox!!!



miggols99
September 6th, 2008, 10:50 PM
I was working on a review for my website and accidentally pressed the back button. I frantically pressed the forward button to find that the input box was blank. I just lost three whole hours of work...:(

I just wish there was a way to recover it...in the cache? Somewhere? :(

Dr Small
September 6th, 2008, 10:55 PM
Tough luck. There's no way that I know of. It was stored in the RAM, but is most likely gone now...

Next time, write things in vim, save every 5 sentances (if you are paranoid) and then when you are finished, copy and paste.

Dr Small
September 6th, 2008, 10:57 PM
Wait, I have a better idea. Remove the back/forward/stop/refresh/home buttons, like me, and use keyboard shortcuts.

Johnsie
September 6th, 2008, 10:57 PM
That sucks, I do that that all the time. I guess it depends on how the text boxes work on the site you are using. Some of them use special javascript ones and they re-load when you press the button to go back into them. It's too late for you to do anything now but in the future I recommend using the clipboard frequently to store data or writing them in a text editor and saving them. It would be nice if firefox could remember what was typed into textareas though. Maybe you could submit that as a a feature request over that their site.

miggols99
September 6th, 2008, 10:58 PM
Well this has happened a few times ago..but not so much. How do you set keyboard shortcuts in Firefox? Do you need an addon?

pt123
September 6th, 2008, 10:59 PM
But the real question is what were you doing on a web page for 3 hours.

~LoKe
September 6th, 2008, 11:00 PM
Why anyone would put three hours worth of writing into a form is beyond me. All important work of mine is done in a text editor, so I can save when need be.

urukrama
September 6th, 2008, 11:01 PM
One more reason why I love Opera. The text in input boxes remains there if you press back and then go back forward.

miggols99
September 6th, 2008, 11:04 PM
But the real question is what were you doing on a web page for 3 hours.
Uh..typing a review for my website? I already said this didn't I?

@~LoKe: Wow..I really think I should start doing stuff like that in a text editor. It's in Drupal so I do everything on a web page. Never really thought of putting it in a text editor.

tom66
September 6th, 2008, 11:29 PM
Dump all your memory to a file (cat /proc/kmem > memory.dat or something) then look for it? I don't know. By the way, don't do this if you have any more than two megabytes of memory... you'll regret it.

Barrucadu
September 6th, 2008, 11:41 PM
You worked for more than three hours without saving? Bad idea.

Warpnow
September 6th, 2008, 11:52 PM
I, also, believe opera saves your text boxes.

In fact. I just went back on this forum, and came forward, and my text above was not removed.

spupy
September 6th, 2008, 11:53 PM
One more reason why I love Opera. The text in input boxes remains there if you press back and then go back forward.

Wait, Firefox 3 already does that, doesn't it? In fact it did with this post. And it's not due to an extension.

~LoKe
September 7th, 2008, 12:53 AM
I, also, believe opera saves your text boxes.

In fact. I just went back on this forum, and came forward, and my text above was not removed.

FF3 does this too.

tom66
September 7th, 2008, 12:58 AM
I can vouch for Firefox doing this. Just tested it.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1

miggols99
September 7th, 2008, 12:59 AM
Well maybe it only works for a short time? Because it definitely didn't work for me...

tom66
September 7th, 2008, 01:01 AM
Odd. I would go back and check, just in case...

stinger30au
September 7th, 2008, 01:15 AM
i suggest in future you type away in open office.
it has an autosave and u wont lose your data.

a tough lesson to learn

LaRoza
September 7th, 2008, 01:17 AM
One more reason why I love Opera. The text in input boxes remains there if you press back and then go back forward.

Opera notes are also great.

Opera notes. No need to explictly save. Light, inbuilt note taking. Every browser should have it.

Dr Small
September 7th, 2008, 02:03 AM
Well this has happened a few times ago..but not so much. How do you set keyboard shortcuts in Firefox? Do you need an addon?

Keyboard shortcuts are already set. Just look around in help.


Why anyone would put three hours worth of writing into a form is beyond me. All important work of mine is done in a text editor, so I can save when need be.

I know. I am copying in a book into the computer, and I save just about every paragraph, for fear of losing something and have to retype it all.


Dump all your memory to a file (cat /proc/kmem > memory.dat or something) then look for it? I don't know. By the way, don't do this if you have any more than two megabytes of memory... you'll regret it.

Ohh. This sounds fun.
*Dr Small runs off to try this.

tom66
September 7th, 2008, 02:05 AM
However, adding more features to a browser, in the case of Opera, can cause bloat. It's nice, sure, but it could do without the feature. I can survive with, in fact I regularily use Tomboy Notes.

LaRoza
September 7th, 2008, 04:11 AM
However, adding more features to a browser, in the case of Opera, can cause bloat. It's nice, sure, but it could do without the feature. I can survive with, in fact I regularily use Tomboy Notes.

Opera isn't bloated...

Its features use no extra RAM when not used and the note feature is extremely light. It isn't like Firefox with its memory hungry cache and extensions.

Canis familiaris
September 7th, 2008, 04:32 AM
opera isn't bloated...

Its features use no extra ram when not used and the note feature is extremely light. It isn't like firefox with its memory hungry cache and extensions.

+1

roadrun777
September 7th, 2008, 05:49 AM
I am not really defending firefox or opera, but if you need form saving you can install an extension for firefox. It's modular. Thats why I like it.

There are 2 extensions I know of -

Form Saver

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1490

AutoSaveTextToCookie

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6419

Sounds like autosavetexttocookie is what you want to install.

Warpnow
September 7th, 2008, 05:49 AM
However, adding more features to a browser, in the case of Opera, can cause bloat. It's nice, sure, but it could do without the feature. I can survive with, in fact I regularily use Tomboy Notes.

Running Tomboy notes is going to use more resources than that tiny bit of code causes opera to use.

Opera is the least bloated browser of any of the multi-platform ones I've heard of.

Opera uses less resources, is smaller, and is faster. The only "bloat" is in features, and they are arranged in a way that you never notice they are there until you use them.

Opera is DEFINITELY not bloated. Firefox is the bloat king.

pp.
September 7th, 2008, 08:46 AM
One more reason why I love Opera. The text in input boxes remains there if you press back and then go back forward.

It is just possible that it's not question of the browser but of the site being browsed. If it has a script which clears the input box when entering the page, that would explain the startling disappearance of the text.

Of course, as most have pointed out, it is not generally considered a good idea to spend a long time entering stuff without saving even once.

As OP now presumably knows. Just write it off as your tuition fee.

MONODA
September 7th, 2008, 09:12 AM
there is a firefox extension to restore that :D not sure what it is called though...

tom66
September 7th, 2008, 11:06 AM
Seems I've started a discussion. What I'm saying is, to run Opera, the program code must reside somewhere in memory, right? The note taking app takes up memory. Tomboy Notes, although it takes up more memory, much more, only is loaded when it's needed. I never meant to say Opera was bloated, it is in fact quite light but I'm saying you can work without the feature. Plus, I guess one benefit to having multiple programs is that if you have a note app open and a browser window open, it's usually only one which crashes, and if you copy between the two you can never loose too much work.

dada1958
September 7th, 2008, 11:52 AM
It's all text (https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/4125) ...

mister_pink
September 7th, 2008, 12:12 PM
Theres also an addon called lazerus, which recovers lost form data. As for whether FF3 does it itself anyway, the answer is only sometimes - it depends on exactly how the website is designed. Even with all these form saving things, they're useful for recovering short things like what I'm doing now, but 3 hours work is definitely worth being more paranoid about!

billgoldberg
September 7th, 2008, 12:46 PM
I was working on a review for my website and accidentally pressed the back button. I frantically pressed the forward button to find that the input box was blank. I just lost three whole hours of work...:(

I just wish there was a way to recover it...in the cache? Somewhere? :(

Write your articles in gedit or something.

hopo
December 5th, 2008, 08:31 PM
Just for the record: There is a really geeky solution to this problem if you haven't already closed your browser (I assume the guy asking the question already has, but for all you coming here to find your answers, read on).

Firefox seems to keep a lot of data in memory, and here is what you do to dump memory to disk and recover your lost work:

1) First, find the PID of Firefox. Do a 'ps aux | grep firefox' in command prompt, and take notice of the first number. In my case the PID was 6888.
2) Secondly, dump firefox' memory to disk with gcore: 'gcore -o dumpfile 6888'. This might take a little time; let's hope you have enough disk space.
3) Third, extract all text from the dump: 'strings dumpfile &> strings.txt'.
4) Fourth, now your text should be in strings.txt, but along with it there is a considerable amount of junk. Try to remember a keyword from the text you want to find; I looked for "Modular".
a. Check if the keyword is in strings.txt (repeat with another keyword if you get zero, remember to spell it EXACTLY right): 'grep Modular strings.txt'. I got the number one (meaning that Modular was found one place in strings.txt).
b. When you have a hit, open strings.txt in your favorite editor (could be gedit or whatever, I used vim): 'vim strings.txt'.
c. Search for the keyword again: '/Modular' + Return (in vim)

Got it?

I recovered at least an hour's worth of hard thinking and writing by following this recipe. The recovered text even contained correct Wiki syntax and -voila- back to HAPPY!

You're welcome :D

Cracauer
December 5th, 2008, 08:42 PM
However, adding more features to a browser, in the case of Opera, can cause bloat. It's nice, sure, but it could do without the feature. I can survive with, in fact I regularily use Tomboy Notes.

I didn't read the other replies, but here's my 2 cents:

1) it's not firefox'es fault. What you did, using the back and forth buttons, actually does not lose the text boxes' content. You can try that on this very forum.

The reason why it nuked it in your case is something the website itself did. Could be either expire headers or pre-filled forms.

2) you don't have to cut'n'paste. There are several extensions to firefox that allow you to directly use a real editor in place of textboxes. I used mozex for a while (and still do to see page source). For text boxes I use "It's all text" now. In fact that's where I'm typing right now.

I also have a front-end script that I use between firefox/itsalltext and emacs that saves a copy of what I write in an archive directory. That gives you the same effect as a "sent" folder when doing email.

MikeTheC
December 5th, 2008, 08:51 PM
Next time, write things in vim, save every 5 sentances (if you are paranoid) and then when you are finished, copy and paste.

+1 for the "write it elsewhere then copy and paste" part of the suggestion. Anything I'm typing that's of consequence and/or of length I usually type up (including BBCode) in GEdit, since it's easy, quick, and a GUI app, do all of my editing, etc., and then copy-paste to Firefox.

koenn
December 5th, 2008, 10:15 PM
Just for the record: There is a really geeky solution to this problem ...

nice.

init1
December 5th, 2008, 10:23 PM
If you're really desperate, you can do a


cat /dev/mem>memdump
cat memdump|grep -i phrase you remember

which will search everything in RAM.

magmon
December 5th, 2008, 10:34 PM
Follow this link (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6984), its an addon for firefox that saves everything you type as you type it, and you can restore a form if need be.

chucky chuckaluck
December 5th, 2008, 10:44 PM
on the bright side, there's always the chance you'd be looking back at what you wrote, a month from now, thinking "god, i'm an idiot!". you've saved yourself from that potential embarrassment, at least.

rduke15
May 20th, 2010, 09:19 AM
I had great hopes for the few solutions suggested here, but none worked (on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04):


$ sudo cat /dev/mem > /docs/memory.dat
cat: /dev/mem: Operation not permitted


$ sudo cat /dev/kmem > /docs/memory.dat
cat: /dev/kmem: No such device or address


$ gcore -o /docs/firefox-mem PID

This sort of worked, but the resulting file didn't contain anything from the form; still, this is what I will try more quickly next time.

There is also the firefox cache (typing "about:cache" in the Firefox URL bar), as suggested here: http://www.rlmseo.com/blog/recover-deleted-posts-using-firefox-cache

That didn't work for me because I apparently had disabled the cache...

philinux
May 20th, 2010, 10:45 AM
Thread closed Necromonger.

Please start a new thread in General help or ABT thanks.