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Firefox Screwed Up My Bookmarks

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  • Last reply by eugbug1

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I just wanted to make my bookmarks from my new PC available on my old PC. I signed into sync on the new PC and it's imported a whole of of old links and totally messed up the setup on the machine. Has it merged the bookmarks or imported old saved bookmarks from my account? Is there a way of reversing this. I selected add another device and maybe it found the old computer on which I was logged into my Mozilla account.

I just wanted to make my bookmarks from my new PC available on my old PC. I signed into sync on the new PC and it's imported a whole of of old links and totally messed up the setup on the machine. Has it merged the bookmarks or imported old saved bookmarks from my account? Is there a way of reversing this. I selected add another device and maybe it found the old computer on which I was logged into my Mozilla account.

Chosen solution

Sync uploads data from all connected devices to the Sync server and merges this data among all other connected devices, there is no one way transfer possible like from a master to a slave device. You can try to disconnect Sync and choose to remove all synced data from this device.

Firefox keeps backups in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox profile folder, so you can restore an older backup that isn't affected. You lose bookmarks newer than the backup you restore as importing a JSON backup replaces all current bookmarks.

The name of automatically created JSON bookmarks backups in the bookmarkbackups folder includes a total item count (folders and separators included) and an hash value to prevent saving the same backup more than once. You also see this count in the Library Restore menu drop-down list.

  • bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.jsonlz4.

You can use an HTML backup to transfer the bookmarks.

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Chosen Solution

Sync uploads data from all connected devices to the Sync server and merges this data among all other connected devices, there is no one way transfer possible like from a master to a slave device. You can try to disconnect Sync and choose to remove all synced data from this device.

Firefox keeps backups in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox profile folder, so you can restore an older backup that isn't affected. You lose bookmarks newer than the backup you restore as importing a JSON backup replaces all current bookmarks.

The name of automatically created JSON bookmarks backups in the bookmarkbackups folder includes a total item count (folders and separators included) and an hash value to prevent saving the same backup more than once. You also see this count in the Library Restore menu drop-down list.

  • bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.jsonlz4.

You can use an HTML backup to transfer the bookmarks.

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In the end I just deleted all my bookmarks rather than trying to sift through them and delete the ones I don't want. The syncing also removed my add ons so I'll have to reinstall them (Probably because I deleted them from the old computer and they got removed from the new one too). In future I'll just sync bookmarks. I think by default, everything is synced?