installing snap chromium trashed my pre-snap files

[Kathleen Caywood]

Most of my bookmarks, passwords, etc., from the pre-snap version of chromium are gone since I installed snap chromium.

Description: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Release: 22.04

chromium-browser:
  Installed: 1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu2
  Candidate: 1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu2 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I expected my most recent bookmarks and files to be accessible after replacing the non-snap chromium with the snap chromium

Instead, the only version of book marks, configuration, passwords, etc., are several years old

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Thanks for the report Kathleen, and sorry to hear that your
configuration was affected.

 > Most of my bookmarks, passwords, etc., from the pre-snap version of
 > chromium are gone

How did you conclude this? Was it by observing Chromium itself, or did
you inspect the filesystem to ascertain it?

The Chromium deb stores its configuration files in
$HOME/.config/chromium, whereas the snap in $HOME/snap/chromium/common.

[Kathleen Caywood (kmcaywood)]

On 1/2/23 06:49, Nathan Teodosio wrote:
> Thanks for the report Kathleen, and sorry to hear that your
> configuration was affected.
>
> > Most of my bookmarks, passwords, etc., from the pre-snap version of
> > chromium are gone
>
> How did you conclude this? Was it by observing Chromium itself, or did
> you inspect the filesystem to ascertain it?

I had been having frequent hangs with my 4-year-old Ryzen 5 1400
system.  In the process of debugging, I replaced my boot drive, which
also had /home on it.  When I installed ubuntu a year ago, I downloaded
and installed chromium from your website.  It was not the snap version.

This time I reinstalled after installing the new drive (500G M.2), and
the ubuntu installer did not install chromium.  I went looking, and it
appeared that snap-chromium was now the preferred version, so I
installed it.

When I did, I found I no longer had any bookmarks, passwords, etc., and
inspected the file system.  Please do not try to lay this at the feet of
the M.2 drive or the ubuntu installer.

>
> The Chromium deb stores its configuration files in
> $HOME/.config/chromium, whereas the snap in $HOME/snap/chromium/common.
>

--
  Kathleen M. Caywood, <email address hidden>

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

This was confusing to me.

 > I replaced my boot drive, which also had /home on it.

So you would no longer have user configuration files in your new set up.

 > and installed chromium from your website

What do you mean?

[Kathleen Caywood (kmcaywood)]

On 1/3/23 08:45, Nathan Teodosio wrote:
> This was confusing to me.
>
> > I replaced my boot drive, which also had /home on it.
>
> So you would no longer have user configuration files in your new set up.

I restored my home directory from backup.

>
> > and installed chromium from your website
>
> What do you mean?

I went looking for chromium installation.  I thought I found it on
chromium.org, but I may have gotten it from ubuntu.  It was called
chromium-snap

>
>
> ** Changed in: chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>

--
  Kathleen M. Caywood, <email address hidden>

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

> I restored my home directory from backup.
Do you still have that backup available? If yes, and if
~/.config/chromium exists in it, you could try replacing
~/snap/chromium/common/chromium with it (better to do a backup of the
latter though if you already have configuration worth keeping in your
current set up).

> I went looking for chromium installation.  I thought I found it on
> chromium.org, but I may have gotten it from ubuntu.  It was called
> chromium-snap

The Ubuntu maintained snap has a hook[1] to do the process I suggested
above so that one's data does not get lost when transitioning to the snap.

One data point worth knowing if you can ascertain that: Which Chromium
version was used in the old and current setups?

[1]:
https://git.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+git/snap-from-source/tree/launcher/chromium.launcher?h=stable#n13

[Kathleen Caywood (kmcaywood)]

I only keep one backup, so it has been rewritten several times since the
incident.

The problem with conversion to snap is that nothing says ahead of time,
"Oh by the way you need to take these steps to preserve your data
because the snap mechanism may destroy it."

I cannot tell you which version of chromium was used in the old setup.

On 1/3/23 10:05, Nathan Teodosio wrote:
>> I restored my home directory from backup.
> Do you still have that backup available? If yes, and if
> ~/.config/chromium exists in it, you could try replacing
> ~/snap/chromium/common/chromium with it (better to do a backup of the
> latter though if you already have configuration worth keeping in your
> current set up).
>
>> I went looking for chromium installation.  I thought I found it on
>> chromium.org, but I may have gotten it from ubuntu.  It was called
>> chromium-snap
> The Ubuntu maintained snap has a hook[1] to do the process I suggested
> above so that one's data does not get lost when transitioning to the snap.
>
> One data point worth knowing if you can ascertain that: Which Chromium
> version was used in the old and current setups?
>
> [1]:
> https://git.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+git/snap-from-source/tree/launcher/chromium.launcher?h=stable#n13
>

--
  Kathleen M. Caywood, <email address hidden>

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

> The problem with conversion to snap is that nothing says ahead of time,
> "Oh by the way you need to take these steps to preserve your data
> because the snap mechanism may destroy it."

You should not need to do so, the official snap is supposed to do that
automatically and seamlessly via the hook I pointed to in my previous
comment.

[Kathleen Caywood (kmcaywood)]

The files in ~/.config/chromium are over 2 years old.  It is no help at all.

On 1/4/23 05:45, Nathan Teodosio wrote:
>> The problem with conversion to snap is that nothing says ahead of time,
>> "Oh by the way you need to take these steps to preserve your data
>> because the snap mechanism may destroy it."
> You should not need to do so, the official snap is supposed to do that
> automatically and seamlessly via the hook I pointed to in my previous
> comment.
>

--
  Kathleen M. Caywood, <email address hidden>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for chromium-browser (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]