error: "Syncing failed with The operation was aborted." about floccus

[Simplenuity]

OK, I did some testing and troubleshooting. Long story short: the XBEL file has been corrupted! It was still readable with an editor but more than half of the content got lost (compared to a backup file).
Maybe of interest: on purpose and after bad experiences (data loss) I only have one browser pushing changes to the file bookmarks.xbel. All other browsers are only allowed to pull the content of bookmarks.xbel while local changes get discarded.

However, it's still not working!

Case 1: bookmarks.xbel file is defined in floccus settings but not created in Nextcloud. Folder path exists.
Result: Syncing runs without obvious error message. Only message is: Last synchronized: 0 seconds ago But bookmarks.xbel is not created.

Case 2: The defined bookmarks.xbel file has been created in Nextcloud (as empty text file)
Result: Syncing fails with error message: E034: Remote bookmarks file is unreadable. Did you forget to set an encryption passphrase?

Log files will be uploaded to your cloud.

[Simplenuity]

Thanks @marcelklehr for taking the time.
I'll test some network related settings and report back if I can find anything relevant.

[Simplenuity]

@marcelklehr, positive news:

• TL;DR:
  it's working again!

• long version:
  While testing some network settings I noticed a change in error messages - and that my file manager's webdav connection to the server went down. Checking the login page it turned out that the server had been taken into maintenance mode! Meanwhile it's back up - and floccus sync is working as expected. I assume(!) the server had been in a degraded state quite some time before the service completely shut down.

I'll monitor the situation closely for some time.

[github-actions]

Hello 👋

Thank you for taking the time to open this issue with floccus. I know it's frustrating when software
causes problems. You have made the right choice to come here and open an issue to make sure your problem gets looked at
and if possible solved.
I'm Marcel and I created floccus and have been maintaining it ever since.
I currently work for Nextcloud which leaves me with less time for side projects like this one
than I used to have.
I still try to answer all issues and if possible fix all bugs here, but it sometimes takes a while until I get to it.
Until then, please be patient.
Note also that GitHub is a place where people meet to make software better together. Nobody here is under any obligation
to help you, solve your problems or deliver on any expectations or demands you may have, but if enough people come together we can
collaborate to make this software better. For everyone.
Thus, if you can, you could also have a look at other issues to see whether you can help other people with your knowledge
and experience. If you have coding experience it would also be awesome if you could step up to dive into the code and
try to fix the odd bug yourself. Everyone will be thankful for extra helping hands!
One last word: If you feel, at any point, like you need to vent, this is not the place for it; you can go to the forum,
to twitter or somewhere else. But this is a technical issue tracker, so please make sure to
focus on the tech and keep your opinions to yourself.

I look forward to working with you on this issue
Cheers 💙

[marcelklehr]

You are getting the same error on all Browsers you listed?

[Simplenuity]

yes, on all of them

[LokChunYu]

chrome,Edge,firefox both the following prompts "This profile will be synced soon. We're either waiting for other devices of yours, or other profiles on this device, to finish syncing."

[marcelklehr]

@LokChunYu This is a different bug, see #1548

[marcelklehr]

I'm unable to reproduce this. How many bookmarks do you have? Is there anything special about your setup? Did floccus work before updating to v5.1.0?

[LokChunYu]

Worked fine before upgrading v5.1.0, I synced bookmarks via WebDAV URLs with 600+ bookmarks

[Simplenuity]

I've about 1,500 bookmarks
Setup I'd consider common, nothing special I can think of in regard to Floccus
I sync via WebDAV URL and a XBEL file

I need to roll back to former versions to confirm when the issue started. Will get back to you.

Many thanks for your efforts!

[marcelklehr]

Thank you for investigating further.

Case 1: The local bookmarks folder seems to be empty, which is why no file is created on the server.

Case 2: The empty file causes the error. The log in this case doesn't help determine what caused the empty file.

[marcelklehr]

on purpose and after bad experiences (data loss)

Nextcloud should be able to keep past versions of the xbel file, which might help. In general, sync is not a backup, of course, so I very much encourage everyone to backup their bookmarks regularly

[marcelklehr]

the XBEL file has been corrupted!

Very strange 🤔

[Simplenuity]

on purpose and after bad experiences (data loss)

Nextcloud should be able to keep past versions of the xbel file, which might help. In general, sync is not a backup, of course, so I very much encourage everyone to backup their bookmarks regularly

Refreshing to read the clear statement: sync is not a backup

I did and do have backups. So I was able to recover from the data loss :)

[Simplenuity]

Thanks for locking into it so quickly!

Case 1: The local bookmarks folder seems to be empty, which is why no file is created on the server.

But it isn't. I can see all the bookmarks as usual via the browser built-in bookmark manager. The local bookmark file of the browser (Opera) is readable and about 1 MB.
I'll do some further testing.

Case 2: The empty file causes the error. The log in this case doesn't help determine what caused the empty file.

Sorry, there might be a misunderstanding. The empty file got created manually to see whether the presence (but without header/syntax) will make a difference when syncing via floccus.

[Simplenuity]

Problem solved!

During my tests I had to restore the folder holding all the bookmarks to be synced and configured under "Folder mapping" in floccus. After the restore I ended up with two folders with the same name. So I deleted the original one which was empty and it got moved to bookmark trash. However, in floccus the path under "Folder mapping" got dynamically adjusted now pointing to the folder in the trash! Setting back the path made floccus pick the correct folder again.

From my end the ticket could be closed.
But

• @LokChunYu also posted here
• you still might want to look into some aspects? If you need any testing done, please let me know.

Thank you!

[Simplenuity]

UPDATE: I need to take back that it can be closed :(

After a few hours of operation incl. one suspend state of machine it's failing again!

• bookmarks.xbel file is intact (identical with backup)
• I can see a file bookmarks.xbel.lock with creation date a few hours ago

log file shows:

onSyncStart: begin
https://nextcloud.webo.hosting/remote.php/webdav/bookmarks/bookmarks.xbel.lock
onSyncStart: begin
Syncing failed with Failed to fetch
onSyncFail

after removing the lock file and manually running sync again, it's still failing with this messages in the log file:

onSyncStart: begin
https://nextcloud.webo.hosting/remote.php/webdav/bookmarks/bookmarks.xbel.lock
Setting lock: https://nextcloud.webo.hosting/remote.php/webdav/bookmarks/bookmarks.xbel.lock
Syncing failed with Failed to fetch
onSyncFail
Freeing lock: https://nextcloud.webo.hosting/remote.php/webdav/bookmarks/bookmarks.xbel.lock

[marcelklehr]

Huh, could you open the debugger in your browser to check what happens to the network request here?

The following are the steps to do that:

Firefox

• Go to about:debugging
• go to "This firefox"
• click on Inspect button next to floccus entry
• go to the network tab in the inspector
• trigger a sync by clicking the sync now button for the account of your choice.
• check the failing network requests

Chrome

• Go to chrome://extensions
• enable Developer mode
• click on Service worker link in floccus' entry next to "Inspect views: "
• go to the network tab in the inspector window
• trigger a sync by clicking the sync now button for the account of your choice
• check the failing network requests

[Simplenuity]

Hi @marcelklehr, I've uploaded screenshots to your cloud.
In case it's relevant:
Opera: configured as push only
Firefox: configured as pull only

[marcelklehr]

It seems that the issue is a NS_ERROR_NET_PARTIAL_TRANSFER, so I'm guessing something is wrong with the network between floccus and your nextcloud that causes a mere partial transfer of the file. Since floccus is on the receiving end, there's not much I can do here. I recommend contacting your hoster.