Virgin profiles, bookmarks & speedial thumbnails.
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Since the very early days of V i've been creating fresh virgin user-steffie profiles, once i deduced many of the key files & subdirectories to later copy across from old to new, to fix my V after random wobblies arose after version updates, or occasional crashes. In most respects, reverting to a clean fresh V profile then making it "mine" again with my notes, bookmarks, history, tabs, extensions is quite fast, maybe only needing ~30' or so...'ish.
However, the one aspect of this process which i've never conquered, which extends the process from minutes to hours, & hence which causes me to grimace any time i contemplate a need for a fresh profile, is my bookmark's speedials' thunbnails. This is horrible & gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.
Simply copying across the
Bookmarks
&Top Sites
files is insufficient. All my speedials at that point still have no thumbnails, historically necessitating me manually recreating them via F5, in each of my [many] SD folders & [many] subfolders, layer by layer. It takes hours to complete this ultra-tedious process, & inevitably involves one or several V crashes before it's complete.Observing that early-on within the
Bookmarks
file structure there's a checksum, i intuit that's the reason for my misery, & it's probably unable to be worked-around. Nonetheless i shall ask... is there another file or folder that i must also copy across, so that all my SD thumbnails then are instantly available? -
When I had to refresh my profile multiple times, i found out that one file is needed to regain your SD custom thumbs: file_mapping.json
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@iAN-CooG Thank you... but i have no custom thumbnails, only [gazillions of] the ones auto-generated via F5. Does that file cover these too, do you know?
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Same issue here. I tried last year to write a script to copy my V profile and associated files.
Never worked properly as I could never compile a complete list of Profile materials.
Way back when, using O.xx someone had written an Opera backup utility. Backed up what you wanted (customizable) to a .zip file and Opera was easy to restore if one messed it up.
I am guessing part of the problem is the Chromium based file structure. Things just aren't were you expect them to be. -
@iAN-CooG Thanks for the link and list!
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copy my V profile
backup utilityJust to be clear, to eliminate any ambiguity... my query is not a general one to backup my V profile per se... that's easy & as i said/implied in OP, i deduced how to do that years ago. My need is narrowly explicit to the myriad speedial thumbnails -- i'm sick of having to manually regenerate them, rather than simply have them also copy across to the clean profile.
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The VivaldiThumbnails folder seems to be the best candidate.
My path is /home/administrator/.config/vivaldi-snapshot/Default/VivaldiThumbnails -
@claudio Holy cow, hooly dooly, shadrack & sheepdip! Eureka Thanks so much, but this is deeply deeply embarrassing. I have no comprehension whatsoever for how i could have been
not seeing
that subdirectory --for years--. I must be blinder than the blindest bat. It worked a treat, copying that across now... instantly all my existing SD thumbnails appeared in the new profile; no F5ing needed. Now i'm trying to fathom why, all these months & years, i've had the wrong thought in my silly head that it was theTop Sites
file responsible for the thumbnails. Gahhhh.
Hey, wait a tick... this is why i had been thinking that: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/13670/cloning-complete-vivaldi-settings/5 ...
The following explains some key information stored under the Default folder:
Bookmarks: This contains bookmarks and Speed Dials information.
Notes: This contains notes information.
Sessions: This contains saved tabs sessions.Login Data: This contains website passwords. Note: This file is encrypted and is only usable on the machine that created it.
Preferences and Local App Settings\mpognobbkildjkofajifpdfhcoklimli: This contains Vivaldi settings and configurations.
Web Data: This contains autofill data.
Current Session: This contains data on open tabs.
Top Sites: This contains thumbnails.
History: This contains website history.
Cookies: Website data.Extension Rules, Extension State, Extensions, Local Extension Settings, Local Storage, Managed Extension Storage, Extension Cookies and Secure Preferences: All extension preferences and extension data are stored here.
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@Steffie Agreed. Everything we users use should be in the "Profile" or some clearly marked folder so that some talented chap can write a backup utility as I mentioned. I just found it Stu's Opera Settings Import & Export Tool.
Worked wonderfully when I used it years back. Just downloaded and virus checked it and will try what is left of my O12 tomorrow.
Wish I knew who "Stu" was... -
@Steffie Your understanding actually was correct. VivaldiThumbnails is a new change that got introduced in Vivaldi 2.4. Chromium used to store its thumbnails in Top Sites and Vivaldi did so as well. Then, a few releases ago, Chromium stopped saving thumbnails altogether... and in Chromium 73, they introduced another code change where they would actually purge the stored thumbnails from Tops Sites. Not a good thing for Vivaldi. So, the devs had to come up with an alternative scheme to store Vivaldi's thumbnails.
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@xyzzy Oh thank goodness... hence thank you so much for ending my self-recriminations. Over the years i have spent a lot of time "in" my profile directory & subdirectories, i have virginated my profile numerous times, i have copied my profile [sometimes in toto, sometimes only a discrete subset of files & subdirectories] between computers, i have created various data backup regimens predicated on my understanding of the significant files... yada yada. Hence @claudio's vital new info hit me very hard, being simultaneously a huge breakthrough in my quest-of-years [part-time, teehee] to efficiently copy my extant SD TNs sans the F5 brute-force fallback, but at same time a massive confidence-downer re "how on earth had i simply been soooo blind to that subdirectory?". I feel less bad about it now; it means i've only been an idiot since 2.4, not since TP1 heehee.
so that some talented chap can write
Yes, or maybe even [gasp], some less-talented gal...
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@Steffie Did you see who wrote the routine to capture the black hole image? Or who wrote the programming for the Apollo 11 moon landing?
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@Ayespy Yes to both... but i'm not the one unaware that technical competence is not the sole domain of any one gender... but you already knew that too.
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@Steffie Yeah. Just sayin.' HIdden Figures is real... Wonder if I'm related to that Apollo programmer?
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@xyzzy said in Virgin profiles, bookmarks & speedial thumbnails.:
@Steffie Your understanding actually was correct. VivaldiThumbnails is a new change that got introduced in Vivaldi 2.4. Chromium used to store its thumbnails in Top Sites and Vivaldi did so as well. Then, a few releases ago, Chromium stopped saving thumbnails altogether... and in Chromium 73, they introduced another code change where they would actually purge the stored thumbnails from Tops Sites. Not a good thing for Vivaldi. So, the devs had to come up with an alternative scheme to store Vivaldi's thumbnails.
That's some news to me too, I assume the content of that dir was generated extracting everything from the Topsite db regardless of which thumbnail was actually in use, as I find in it some thumbs I made 4 years ago but now they got replaced by newer ones, even custom.
Anyway I've updated my list of files to keep when refreshing the profile, in the unfortunate event I had to do it again. Would be even better if the list of files/dirs to keep would be mentioned fully in the help page
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/full-reset-of-vivaldi/ -
@Steffie said in Virgin profiles, bookmarks & speedial thumbnails.:
@iAN-CooG Thank you... but i have no custom thumbnails, only [gazillions of] the ones auto-generated via F5. Does that file cover these too, do you know?
Which auto-generated ones do you mean? F5 (refresh) of what, specifically?
I just noticed that I have over 600 images in VivaldiThumbnails, most all dated about a month ago. They're images of all sorts of sites that I visit, WAY more than the 16 sites I have in Speed DIal. I deleted most of the images and am hoping to find a way to avoid whatever caused it.
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@rseiler I think these thumbnails are generated for Tab Thumbnails. Disable Tab Thumbnails in Settings, Tabs to stop generating them.
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@rseiler said in Virgin profiles, bookmarks & speedial thumbnails.:
Which auto-generated ones do you mean? F5 (refresh) of what, specifically?
Speeddials.
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@Pesala said in Virgin profiles, bookmarks & speedial thumbnails.:
@rseiler I think these thumbnails are generated for Tab Thumbnails. Disable Tab Thumbnails in Settings, Tabs to stop generating them.
I assumed tab thumbnails were what popup when you hover a tab--which I use all the time--but it turns out those are popup thumbnails. I do use those. I do not use tab thumbnails, and it remains off.
So, I'm not sure how so many extra images were created and why they stopped some weeks ago, unless SpeedDial went rogue. I do the same things in Vivaldi every day, so it doesn't quite make sense that the images stopped being created (aside from the expected SpeedDial ones) weeks ago. I didn't start using 2.4 until the (1) release.
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