On my Slackware Current, Kppp froze on me earlier today and caused everything else to freeze along with it. I restarted my system and found out very quickly that I had lost my data from Thunderbird, Kmail, Konqueror, and Firefox (and probably several other programs). I lost all account information except for cookies and extension preferences. Luckily, I was able to restore my mail from a backup I made last night and my bookmarks (most of them anyway) from a slightly outdated backup. Konqueror was only settings and took about 2 minutes to restore to my liking.

My question is this. Why is it that such a simple little program can cause such devastating damage? Also, would there be a way to prevent this from happening in the future? If I hadn't kept backups of my mail and bookmarks on my jumpdrive, I'd be thoroughly screwed. Kppp has frozen like this before, but I have never lost any data because of it until now.

~digitalhead

The obvious answer would be to use pppd directly and forego the GUI interface.