What about the rest of your profile? history, passwords . . . .

Restore Bookmark Backups

Firefox automatically makes backups of the bookmarks. These are stored in the bookmarkbackups folder.

Open the Bookmarks Manager; Press the Alt or F10 key to bring up the toolbar, and select Bookmarks. Hot key is <Control> (Mac=<Command>) <Shift> B.

Once the window is open, at the top of the page, press the button labeled Import and Backup. Select Restore. From the list, pick the file you want and click it.

The backups are stored in a jsonlz4 file named something like this; bookmarks-2016-06-29_1424_enD1GTH ya0JmicnYWg4V4g==.jsonlz4

In this example; 2016-06-29 = date created, 1424 = number of entries.

History and passwords, too. The only files in Restore are from after the update.

Look on your desktop. Do you see a folder called; Old Firefox?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible

OK, thanks. I seem to have gotten the bookmarks into my new profile. Now how do I get them back into a usable state?

What do you mean; usable state ? Is there a problem?

They're in the profile, but when I click on the bookmarks icon at the top of the page, they don't come up. How do I do that?

Open the Bookmarks Manager; Press the Alt or F10 key to bring up the toolbar, and select Bookmarks. Hot key is <Control> (Mac=<Command>) <Shift> B.

Are the bookmarks there?

Only the ones that I have put there since they all disappeared. None of the ones that am trying to restore.

Let's go back to this:

Tirsh said

They're in the profile, but when I click on the bookmarks icon at the top of the page, they don't come up. How do I do that?

Where in the profile? For example, did you copy files from the bookmarkbackups in Old Firefox Data to the corresponding folder in your currently live profile? Firefox won't automatically restore a backup file in that folder except under special conditions. So at this point, two options:

(A) "Restore" - Replace your current set of bookmarks with the contents of a backup file. If it works, that will roll back your bookmarks to the date of that file; bookmarks you've added recently will be wiped.

(B) "Import" - Add the bookmarks from one of your backup files without replacing your current set. This preserves what you have now but typically requires more work to reorganize them back to their proper locations.

For option (A):

See: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer

For option (B):

I have a tool to convert the .jsonlz4 backup to an importable HTML file:

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

After saving the HTML-format bookmarks file, you can import it using the steps in this article:

Import Bookmarks from an HTML file

The bookmarks might end up back where they were before, or they might all be under an "Imported Bookmarks" folder at the end of the Bookmarks Menu. You can click around in the Library window to find it, and then cut/paste bookmarks and folder to where you want them.

Yes, I copied files from the bookmarkbackups in Old Firefox Data to the corresponding folder in my current profile. Option A doesn't work as the only bookmarks in Restore are the ones I added since they all disappeared. Option B. Well, I tried Option B. The info that opens using Browse is not the same as the info in my profile, but you can't drag and drop from the profile because the window shuts as soon as you click on anything outside it. The info that did get into the empty text box doesn't look like anything that was in the file I looked at, but maybe it isn't supposed to. When I clicked on Export HTML a dialogue box opened - open or save. I did both and they came up the same: Bookmarks Menu

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I have obviously done something wrong but I didn't ever think I would need an engineering degree to operate my computer.

Do you still have older backups in the Old Firefox Data folder, in bookmarkbackups? It is easier to Browse to the desktop than all the way into your live profile folder.

None of my bookmarks were ported into version 65.0 (Firefox Quantum). The Restore option shows many dates to restore from but all give same message: "Unable to process this backup file"

There is no Old Firefox Data on my desktop and all bookmark folders are empty, as well as browsing history. This never happened with the installation of previous versions of Firefox. I'm on a Macbook Air if that helps.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_process_the_backup_file_-_Firefox

jscher2000 has a tool on his website to extract out your bookmarks and save them to an HTML-format bookmark export file. If you want to try it, here is the page:

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

To open the bookmarkbackups folder in Finder, use the "Open in Finder" button in the first table on the Troubleshooting Information page, and double-click into bookmarkbackups where you should see several dated files. From there you can drag and drop onto the conversion tool.

To import the HTML file, see the steps in this article: Import Bookmarks from an HTML file.