4 Oct 2010

Firefox Sync and Firefox 4 Nightly Builds

I run multiple versions of Firefox – the stable (or current) version and a portable copy of the nightly build (or Beta version). I use Firefox Sync to keep their history, passwords and bookmarks in Sync. I recently upgraded my nightly build to Firefox Beta 6 and the Sync stopped working with an error message that says “You need to update Firefox Sync to continue syncing your data”. And strangely, there’s no update available to Firefox Sync (v1.4.4 at present)? Are you in the same situation? Then there’s a solution – Read on.


Here’s what the error looked like for me:
sync-shot1
And the last few lines of your sync log (works only for Firefox with Sync Add-on installed, duh!) should look like the following:
2010-10-03 09:31:28 Service.Main DEBUG Weave Version: 1.4.4 Local Storage: 2 Remote Storage: 3


2010-10-03 09:31:28 Service.Main WARN Upgrade required to access newer storage version.


2010-10-03 09:31:28 Service.Main DEBUG Exception: aborting sync, remote setup failed No traceback available




A quick post on the Sync support mailing list lead me to this post which explains this is because of an upgrade to the format in which data is stored on the server. In short, the Sync Add-on will need to be upgraded whenever a change is made to the format in which data is stored online. Obviously the upgrade hasn’t become available on AMO (i.e. addons.mozilla.org) – yet.


The conclusion? You have two choices


  • You  choose to wait for the add-on to upgrade automatically. This is advisable if you use current versions
  • Manually upgrade to the beta version of Firefox Sync (Beta 1.5 at present - here).  Which you will find yourself doing if you play around with Beta versions. I also had to do this because I suddenly had a lot of changes to sync (especially passwords)  :-(


In any case, this post is with the intent of bringing all of this information on a single page. Please let me know if this helped, if you found anything new or spotted any mistakes.


Useful Links (in reducing order of relevance):


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