My idiot brother uninstalled then reinstalled firefox over a week ago. Years worth of bookmarks were deleted.I tried Recuva and had no luck in finding them.HELP
Over a week maybe a month ago my brother had been using my laptop and some malware and virus type stuff got on it. Him thinking he knows everything decided he would look on google and bing for a possible fix. After downloading I have no idea how many different things to fix it. He finally deleted Mozilla Firefox. He chose to delete everything. And I need to know if there is anyway I can recover those bookmarks? I'm not computer savvy. I leave that to people who know them. So I hope I can get some help here. But I think I'm SOL and have no hope in saving the bookmarks that were deleted.
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Sorry, an undelete utility program like Recuva stands little chance of recovering your data after such a long time. It would have been better to try to recover the same day Firefox was uninstalled with all your data.
So basically I'm SOL? If I had known he deleted them I would have had a better chance. Great. Thanks anyway.
Did you check if you could recover the previous Firefox profile folder with Recuva?
You first need to do that and then try to recover the bookmarkbackups folder and a recent JSON backup.
Window usually doesn't reuse clusters quickly unless the hard disk space has been used up and NTFS keeps the full cluster chain and index (only marks this chain as deleted).
cor-el I tried with Recuva but when I pulled up the bookmarks area they wouldn't restore. The latest date was 07-31-13 and there was no bookmarks.html as showed on the Mozilla support page. So I think if I had known within a day or so I would have been okay. But after all the time that's past. I believe I'm up the it creek and I don't have a paddle or a boat.
Hi Arkaya, bookmarks.html is not created by default; that's an old format now used mostly for interchange between browers. What you want to find is files with names similar to the following:
bookmarks-2013-08-04.json
By the way, even if the .json file won't restore due to some damage, it's text-based data. Therefore, it may be possible to extract a lot of the information through macros or scripts, or very arduous manual editing.