I’m not sure if this is a Fedora issue or a Firefox issue. However, every time the disk is full (specifically the /var/ mount), all data from Firefox gets completely wiped out. This includes all the existing logins I’ve made through the browser, all the credentials I’ve saved and cookies. Browsing any site feels like a new user experience, all sites have my accounts logged out and it’s tedious to login into everything again once this happens.
Strangely enough, all misc data such as profile names and bookmarks are kept intact despite this. I’m quite sure why
Please advise me on what do and how I should fix this problem
Does this also happen if Firefox was not running when disk becomes full? Could be the way Firefox handles such sensitive information, trying to rewrite data back to disk, but unable to do so because it became full. Just a guess.
However, I would rather focus on trying to avoid reaching full disk in the future (from your post I understand it happened several times). Is there nothing you can do to avoid that? Are you using BTRFS snapshots maybe?
When a storage device gets full, data in memory can’t be saved. When that data is a directory, the associated data files no longer have names, so should be given new names in a lost+found directory. You may have a lot of space being used by “lost” files. Years ago when disk space was expensive and projects often needed more space than budgets could afford, systems were often configured to prevent users from exceeding 80% of disk capacity.
I think this is Firefox behaviour by design. Firefox tries to “help” you by managing your disk space through the unsolicited and unnotified data deletion that you’re experiencing.
In about:config you could try setting the preference places.history.expiration.max_pages to 9999999 or some large number, which overrides the usual logic and prevents history deletion. I’m not sure it prevents the auto-deletion of cookies though, which is what causes you to get logged out of sites.
Of course, allowing the partition to get full can cause other issues! The underlying fix is to work out why you’re running so close to capacity.
Caveat - I haven’t really looked at this for a few years since I experienced it on Windows when I had my profile on a RAMdisk. I can’t find anything to say the behaviour has changed, but I didn’t search very diligently.