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Can I locate bookmarks after Windows re-installation?

  • 2 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

user1309299
user1309299
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I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

All Replies (2)

augibson
augibson
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ryley2637 said

I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

If they wiped the HDD, then even file recovery won't do any good to retrieving your bookmarks.

Best regards, Austin

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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Firefox creates only compressed .jsonlz4 backups and being compressed they only contain unknown binary data, so it won't be possible to do a low level search for this data in the case these clusters haven't been reused. A normal reformat wouldn't initialize all bytes to a know value as this would take a very long time to complete with current hard drive sizes, but merely re-initializes the file system data structure.