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I refreshed firefox about a year ago. I cannot open old bookmarks now. Even when I click on "old firefox data" on desktop it never opens

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I pressed the firefox refresh button a year ago. It said none of my bookmarks would be lost. Ive tried countless methods to open these previous bookmarks. Nothing works. I've been given several solutions which all involve complex and many sequences. I am not tech savvy at all. Is there not a simple method to open up old bookmarks by inserting the title somewhere  ?? I have windows 7 and there is on my desktop an icon saying "old firefox data".

Thankyou Philip

I pressed the firefox refresh button a year ago. It said none of my bookmarks would be lost. Ive tried countless methods to open these previous bookmarks. Nothing works. I've been given several solutions which all involve complex and many sequences. I am not tech savvy at all. Is there not a simple method to open up old bookmarks by inserting the title somewhere ?? I have windows 7 and there is on my desktop an icon saying "old firefox data". Thankyou Philip

All Replies (4)

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Hi Philip, in Old Firefox Data, after you click into the old profile folder and old bookmarkbackups folder, you should find compressed files with a .jsonlz4 extension. Are those the ones you are trying to open?

Those files are meant to be applied to your current Firefox using the bookmark Restore feature, but they will replace everything you have now. Considering how long it has been, that probably is not what you want.

Do you just want to extract the file so you can use some of its contents? I have a tool for that on my website. It generates an HTML version of the backup which you can open as a web page or import (Import adds to your bookmarks, unlike Restore, which replaces your bookmarks). That tool is here:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html

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Thankyou for your advice. I will try your back reader but can you clarify that if i click restore for old bookmarks are you saying that my current list of bookmarks (since I pressed refresh over a year ago) will be lost? Or will the old ones simply be added to my current bookmarks. Obviously it is the latter that I am seeking ?

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just tried your bookbackreader. I clicked browse but when i click on to old bookmarks it comes up as goobledeegook in the main window.

And this is the constant message that pops up when i try opening an old bookmark in WMA ie It says "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."

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philipgperry said

Thankyou for your advice. I will try your back reader but can you clarify that if i click restore for old bookmarks are you saying that my current list of bookmarks (since I pressed refresh over a year ago) will be lost? Or will the old ones simply be added to my current bookmarks. Obviously it is the latter that I am seeking ?

Restore will replace not add.

philipgperry said

just tried your bookbackreader. I clicked browse but when i click on to old bookmarks it comes up as goobledeegook in the main window.

What do you mean by gobbledygook? The first step is that the script decompresses the file and puts JSON text into the large white box. This should consist of some recognizable text like URLs and other keyboard characters with an inordinate amount of punctuation. For example:

If you see diamonds and other non-keyboard characters, then most likely the file was corrupted.

After you get the JSON into the box, try the "Export HTML" button in Step 2.

And this is the constant message that pops up when i try opening an old bookmark in WMA ie It says "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."

I'm not surprised. It's not a video.