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After updating to firefox 5 all my bookmarks are lost, and I can not find an old places.sqlite file. What happened to my bookmarks?

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  • Last reply by Abejita

Abejita
Abejita
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I updated from Firefox 3 to Firefox 5 (Windows XP), and all my bookmarks are lost. Maybe I should have thought of making a backup but I did not think of this and previously after an update I could find them again. Now I can not find my bookmarks anywhere, all files in my profile have a date and time from the new installation. Is there any chance of finding my bookmarks somewhere else on my computer? If so, where are they and how can I restore them?

I updated from Firefox 3 to Firefox 5 (Windows XP), and all my bookmarks are lost. Maybe I should have thought of making a backup but I did not think of this and previously after an update I could find them again. Now I can not find my bookmarks anywhere, all files in my profile have a date and time from the new installation. Is there any chance of finding my bookmarks somewhere else on my computer? If so, where are they and how can I restore them?

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cor-el
cor-el
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A possible cause is a problem with the file places.sqlite that stores the bookmarks and the history.

Abejita
Abejita Question owner
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Thanks for the answer. I read the article but it seems that the solution to my problem is not in there. Apart from the lost bookmarks Firefox is working fine, also I can make new bookmarks and delete them without problems. When I restart Firefox I don't loose them.

Apparently after installing Firefox 5 everything of Firefox 3 was deleted including my profile. The only bookmark .json file I have is from the new installation, which means it does not contain any of my old bookmarks. It now has today's date and time.

In my profile I have three 'places' files, now all with today's date and time: - places.sqlite (10240 kb) - places.sqlite-shm (32 kb) - places.sqlite-wal (865 kb)

But even though places.sqlite is large, it apparently does not contain my old information. Or could it? Then how to get to it?

cor-el
cor-el
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Did you uninstall the Firefox 3 version and removed personal data?

If you update then all personal data that is stored in the Firefox Profile Folder should still be there.

Abejita
Abejita Question owner
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Actually the update was not done by me, as I'm in a large network environment where we can not install anything ourselves. So what happened is that I asked our IT department to update to the newest version they had available, which was FF5. When restarting my computer the old FF was removed and the new one installed. Last time this had worked fine, so I didn't think of having to make a special backup of anything before asking for the update.

All files in the profile folder are from after the update, I tried restoring bookmarks from the oldest backup file but this was empty. Yesterday I made a few new bookmarks, and that backup file is larger than the oldest one, so I suppose that one is indeed empty.