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I have tried to reinstall bookmarks from a .json file but I cannot find a solution.

  • 6 replies
  • 2 have this problem
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  • Last reply by John99

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I have tried to follow the online answers but no help. I am running the latest Firefox and WINDOW 2010

I have tried to follow the online answers but no help. I am running the latest Firefox and WINDOW 2010

All Replies (6)

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Please update to Firefox 23 Update Firefox to the latest release. What part of the import are you stuck on?

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move the places.sqlite and try to recover bookmarks from json again.

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Note that your System Details List shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize some prefs on each start of Firefox.

The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created it, so normally it wouldn't be there. You may want to check its content with a plain text editor if you didn't create this file yourself.

The user.js file is read each time you start Firefox and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so involved preferences can only be changed temporarily for the current session.

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The issue is that when I go to bookmarks>show all book marks the dates that come up are the 11th and the 12th . nothing before. If I try to import my bookmarks from a json file on my desktop the file that contains my back ups does not show any dates hen I have opened it. It does if I just go to my desktop library. How can I get the backup files that exist on my desktop back into my firefox.

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Are you copying between two different computers (I think when you refer to your desktop you might mean a different computer)?

The file you want would be in the bookmarkbackups folder with a name similar to bookmarks-2013-08-11.json. To access those recent files, from within your Firefox that has the bookmarks, go to

Help > Troubleshooting Information > "Show Folder" button

Then double-click bookmarkbackups and you can copy the latest files to a USB flash drive or Dropbox or other convenient location for access by the Firefox that needs those files.

Then check out this article: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer.

Please note that using the Restore feature (Import is for HTML format bookmark files, not JSON format bookmark files) will replace your existing bookmarks from the 11th and 12th. If you want to preserve the last two days' worth, you can use the export/import method described in this post: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/966986#answer-463938.

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If you have suitable .json bookmark backups on your desktop they will open and import from the bookmarks library. Note however that importing them will overwrite any existing bookmarks, you may therefore wish to export any current bookmarks as both HTML and .json files before you do any importing.

(HTML files do not have as much information, but

  1. will append instead of overwriting, when imported
  2. may be used in other browsers
  3. may be opened in Firefox or edited in a word processor)

Presumably you have already seen

Did you update Firefox ?

I also note you have extensions that could possibly be malware or adware, and someone or something has created a user.js file.