simple-tab-groups: Backups should not be saved to downloads

May I point again towards storage.local, which would fix this name conflicts as well.

@Jellby I think you’ll agree that’s a very niche / uncommon usage pattern, and not something STG can do much about given the aforementioned API constraints. In your particular edge case, you could work around this by having some cron job that periodically copies your backups from that location to some other location of your choosing. Or include it in your backup scripts (or backup software’s target locations) in the first place (as I can imagine you certainly have backup systems in place, instead of trusting your /home partition to never fail).

Additional info from https://github.com/Drive4ik/simple-tab-groups/issues/1005#issuecomment-1500909947 :

Sometimes, and sometimes every part of Firefox crashes, and you lose your whole profile. Including bookmarks, passwords and addon settings that save data in the profile using the storage API.

Furthermore, from https://github.com/Drive4ik/simple-tab-groups/issues/1012#issuecomment-1500903799 we can see this might become even more difficult with the “Manifest v3” extensions API, the “localStorage” reportedly has a 5/10 MB memory limit.

Since people keep bringing up this issue, maybe the preferences UI should also have a “Why does it save backups into the Downloads folder?” hyperlink to a FAQ entry somewhere (ex: a markdown file in this github repository?) where there is the complete explanation from copy-pasting the various technical answers to this.

@nekohayo , hi. Unfortunately i dont know storage api so cant push fix.

Also you suggestion to hide directory is not so bad, thanks, but hide problem != solve problem.

Moreover want to notice that when #284 was closed the problem was not solved. So the maintainer just ignored community without further designation 😦 Hence please instead of writting f*ck off politely just dont write such community offensive statements at all.

p.s. Please dont take offense.

Hi folks, Personally, as a user, I’m not losing sleep at the existence of the “STG-backups” folder (whose name is configurable anyway) in my Downloads folder, and if I really cared about not visually seeing it in that folder, I could make it a hidden folder…

If you really care deeply about this particular issue, as you seem to know what can/cannot be done by web extensions in terms of storage, at this point now it might be a good idea for one of you to help the maintainer by offering a patch / pull request for this.

I agree, saving the backups in the download folder is irritating (especially as it took me some time to realize that STG = this firefox addon I’d installed a few weeks ago). I think, storage.local is meant for this purpose: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/storage

@grahamperrin according to #284 this folder should be saved in another path. So I always see random folders with random files in my downloads which are obviously for downloaded data but configuration one. Hence all my environment, scripts and workflow is balked at this point.

On linux too, I didn’t read all the details but it sounds very strange that Downlods is selected as backup folder for a firefox extension, every time i see these folders i have to waste another 15 minutes just to realize what is it and to remember that i already did it a week ago. very irritating. more then 2 years and not fixed. I guess the best solution is to uninstall.

Annoyingly, I have the download folder set to /tmp (I don’t want my filesystem clogged with temporary downloads that I never look at again), which results in the backups ending up in /tmp too, and being wiped at system reboot… not very useful backups, I’d say.

IndexedDB file storage library

Would that allow each backup file to be found (without Firefox) by a file manager?

In profile directory each add-on has its own directory with sqlite base and other cached items. I didnt investigate availability to reuse this files manually.

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/downloads/download for filename:

… relative to the default downloads directory … Absolute paths, … and paths containing back-references (…/) will cause an error. …

@grahamperrin I dont know. What about IndexedDB file storage library? Nevertheless, the problem is still persistent.

@grahamperrin ,

I partially fixed this issue in #314 , and fix failed downloads in #313

Read carefully, only the smallest part of the problem has been fixed. But main idea of changing directory has been just ignored and closed?! Well… its at least not serious approach.