Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable

[janrif]

@Ayespy said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

@janrif Sorry, then I'm stumped.

Favicons file is all favicons that appear for tabs, etc. importing that file just saves their having to be downloaded from the web again. It's not your custom data.

Got it

Of course you can delete any folder you no longer need. Just be sure you are sure you don't need anything in it any more.

OK

@Ayespy Just to review. The Pristine_Vivaldi worked ok w all the bells and whistles. Then I changed problematic "Vivaldi" to "Old_Vivaldi". Finally, I changed "Pristine_Vivaldi" to "Vivaldi". There were no system resets between those events. That was the sequence so something happened after the name change. I must have carried it over from the "Old_Vivaldi" but I can't imagine what. Does that narrow it down any?

Just for kicks I ran a Memory Diagnostic Tool, Disk Cleanup & Optimized my system. Then a reset and tested again with the same results.

I guess I'm left with repeating the steps & stopping before I change any folder names to see if the new Stable holds up.

[Ayespy]

@janrif What you theorize is not possible. One standalone instance of Vivaldi cannot "carry over" anything from another standalone instance. Two possibilities come to mind: You have a corruption in your system registry which is only related to a "vivaldi" registry string. OR: one of the "bells and whistles" changes you made did not break your mail view immediately. It took a while for that to be manifested.

You can test the former by renaming the Vivaldi folder and then running the instance under that name (not under the plain name "Vivaldi"). If it's really a registry breakage, the symptom should vanish. Then you can move your vivaldi instances to another drive (to save the data), uninstall Vivaldi using the "remove user data" option, Clear every string containing the word "Vivaldi" from registry, install a brand new Vivaldi instance, set up your mail accounts, etc. make NO CSS modifications, install one extension per day, run it for a full day before installing the next extension, etc. Either your registry is corrupt, or you are adding something that is breaking Vivaldi Stable.

[janrif]

@Ayespy said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

@janrif What you theorize is not possible. One standalone instance of Vivaldi cannot "carry over" anything from another standalone instance.

OK

Two possibilities come to mind: You have a corruption in your system registry which is only related to a "vivaldi" registry string. OR: one of the "bells and whistles" changes you made did not break your mail view immediately. It took a while for that to be manifested.

OK

You can test the former by renaming the Vivaldi folder and then running the instance under that name (not under the plain name (Vivaldi). If it's really a registry breakage, the symptom should vanish.

OK

Then you can move your vivaldi instances to another drive (to save the data), uninstall Vivaldi using the "remove user data" option,

I'm confused. Which Vivaldi am I moving to another drive? And after I've done that, what am I using the "remove data" option on if it's been moved to another drive? And where is the "remove data" option?

Clear every string containing the word "Vivaldi" from registry, install a brand new Vivaldi instance, set up your mail accounts, etc. make NO CSS modifications, install one extension per day, run it for a full day before installing the next extension, etc.

OK

Either your registry is corrupt, or you are adding something that is breaking Vivaldi Stable.

I think I understand. The point is to get "Vivaldi" moved somewhere else so I can remove all "vivaldi" strings in the registry. But what I'm not clear on is whether I am going to lose all my data, i.e. notes, bookmarks, etc?

[Ayespy]

@janrif I should not have said "move" I should have said "copy." Copy it to a removable drive and remove the drive. You will lose absolutely Nothing. Then uninstall anything Windows will uninstall of Vivaldi, then clean the registry of Vivaldi traces. Windows will not, in an of itself, do that.

Copy any instance of Vivaldi whose data you wish to preserve. That could be all three of them.

[janrif]

@Ayespy said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

remove the drive.

?? I have C & D on the machine and an outboard F. Are you talking about copying to F: or can Vivaldi be copied to D:? And, finally, I want to make sure that I don't damage the Snapshot installation. As I clean out the registry, I don't want to accidentally screw that up.

[Ayespy]

@janrif I like to copy stuff off to a USB drive or thumb drive that can be disconnected. Your entire snapshot instance can be moved off and then put back without one speck of data loss. If you are going to be sanitizing the directory, you can afterward install a fresh instance of snapshot (which will re-create any necessary registry entries) and then replace its "Default" folder with the one from your backup.

Vivaldi can be copied to anywhere, but if I'm being careful about data loss, I like to copy to a location that cannot be affected by any shenanigans I perform on the machine. That's just me and my paranoia. That said, my usual practice, when something inexplicably breaks in one of my Vivaldi instances, is to simply install a new standalone instance in a new location with a new name, and rebuild it from the ground up, using sync along the way so that all of my bookmarks, passwords and history are preserved. When I'm sure I don't need the old instance anymore for anything, I just delete it. But I have never had to deal with a registry corruption that was affecting Vivaldi - so I've never had to clean registry for Vivaldi. But I suspect you are kind of a compulsive tinkerer, changing and adding things to Vivaldi all the time - so what you may have accomplished on your setup and how you accomplished it, is hard to say.

As a volunteer tester, I try not to alter or add anything to the functionality of the browser, because I want to be testing what the developer wrote, not some monster that I have created.

[janrif]

@Ayespy working in a brand new standalone stable installation & rebuilding some iconography otherwise I'm ok. Even have css mods & few extensions installed w/o incident so far. Fingers crossed that this is it.

Decided to move good working Vivaldi off to an outboard drive at your suggestion just in case & decided not to muck around in the registry as I'm not sure it's necessary.

Hope you are enjoying your wknd.

[Ayespy]

@janrif Good to hear. Actually feeling pretty crummy today, but not letting it keep me down.

[janrif]

@Ayespy said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

@janrif Good to hear. Actually feeling pretty crummy today, but not letting it keep me down.

Well, that sucks but good that you are chugging along. Hope it's not something like COVID. I've had every vax known to man & keeping my fingers crossed as I've already had it once.

[janrif]

Good day to you, @Ayespy. I have a new situation to run by you.

By accident I d/l latest Snappie to Stable directory folder (by mistake) & after realizing it, I moved the Snappie over to the Snappie directory folder & re-installed another Stable standalone in the Stable directory folder w/o issue only to find that Snappie had changed how email is processed...... so now I'm back on Snapshot -- which is fine -- but I'd like to have a clean Stable installation that can handle my email. So far so good w Snappie but I'd be interested in your thoughts. TIA

[Ayespy]

@janrif said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

Snappie had changed how email is processed......

Can you expand on this? Changed how? Changed in which version?

Additional thought: Don't manually download updates. Let the built-in updater do it. Then you will never update with the wrong stream.

[janrif]

@Ayespy said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

@janrif said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

Snappie had changed how email is processed......

Can you expand on this? Changed how? Changed in which version?

I don't know how it was changed or what it was changed to. I only rcvd got error msg w advice to upgrade my version but my stable v.6.9.3447.51 is the latest stable so I have no where to go in that channel.

Additional thought: Don't manually download updates. Let the built-in updater do it. Then you will never update with the wrong stream.

Right & I will revert going forward. I had altered how I installed a new version by:
[1] downloading new version
[2] closing Vivaldi
[3] starting new standalone version b/c I had an automated upgrade that screwed me up so I became gun shy.

[edwardp]

@janrif If you have both Stable and Snapshot now installed or at one time, you should have a different profile for each.

[janrif]

@edwardp said in Forced onto Snapshot bc Stable Email is Unusable:

@janrif If you have both Stable and Snapshot now installed or at one time, you should have a different profile for each.

Thank you @edwardp @Ayespy I think that's the case -- if I'm understanding your point -- b/c both are standalones in their own directory folders but, the problem is, I can only retrieve my email in the Snapshot.

[Ayespy]

@edwardp No. I use one profile for all versions, all devices, all instances.

By installing standalone, it is automatic that no data from one instance to another is intermixed, except via sync.

A profile is the identity you use to track and access data. The Default folder is not a profile. It is merely the home of your profile in each separate instance.

So, yes, you need a separate User Data folder for each instance, and @janrif has this. But what he did wrong was install Snapshot into the directory location of his Stable instance. And that is the problem that now has to be corrected.

[Ayespy]

@janrif Do you use only IMAP mail?

[Ayespy]

@janrif What happened was that your preferences file and your mail databases were updated to new formats when you installed Snapshot in that folder. That can't be rolled back by installing Stable over it. This is one reason Vivaldi cautions in all cases against rolling back Vivaldi to earlier versions. It's sure to bite you sooner or later. But if you're on IMAP, you can still regain a working mail instance in Stable.

[edwardp]

@janrif The image you posted above showing the mail database error, I believe, is caused once Snapshot updated the mail database, then it was accessed with Stable, which has a lower version number.

This tells me both installations are accessing the same mail profile, which should not be occurring. They must have their own separate mail profiles.

Sync has nothing to do with the mail client, it only deals with your browser data (bookmarks, etc.)

[Ayespy]

@edwardp You are not getting the fact here. @janrif accidentally installed Snapshot OVER his stable instance, and then reinstalled Stable over Snapshot in the same folder. In the meantime, Snapshot had already updated the mail format in that folder. What he wants, is his clean Stable back. I'm trying to help him with this. Might you let us proceed without interruption?

[edwardp]

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