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I can't recover my bookmarks

  • 10 replies
  • 3 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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My laptop crashed but my hard drive was able to be recovered. I tried importing the appdata folder but the only profile that is in there is after the crash. Is there anyway to recover my bookmarks before the crash?

My laptop crashed but my hard drive was able to be recovered. I tried importing the appdata folder but the only profile that is in there is after the crash. Is there anyway to recover my bookmarks before the crash?

All Replies (10)

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Modified by iamjayakumars

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Thank you for the reply, however I don't think I created a profile before and if I did I can't remember the user name or password. I clicked on the link I can't remember user name, but no email is ever sent.

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Are you using Firefox on a new drive or on the recovered drive?

Firefox is pretty predictable in where it locates your profile folder, so if you have looked there, you might not find anything else. However, if your files were shuffled around in the recovery process, you might want to try a global search of the drive for this pattern:

*.json

Make sure to include hidden files and folders, or simply turn on viewing of hidden files and folders full time. See: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files

What you hopefully will find are files named with the pattern

bookmarks-2013-12-31_4671.json

(I think 4671 is the number of bookmarks in that file and obviously will vary for different users.)

Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer

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By the way, when you say you tried "importing the AppData folder", what exactly did you try?

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I tried importing and restoring. When I do a search I see a couple of files from the date of the crash, but none before that. How do I get that one to load. I am working on the new computer with the harddrive back on this computer.

Thanks!

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if you are running windows then do a system restore to a date before the crash. it will not affect files saved but will remove any programs and or viruses installed from that date onward. also restoring program settings from that date.

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Hi deez1980, you can use the steps in the restore article: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer.

Please note that the restore will replace any bookmarks you've added since you re-setup Firefox. If you need to save those, do the restore in this order:

(1) Export current bookmarks to an HTML file. Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks

(2) Restore the backup your found

(3) Import the bookmarks you exported in step #1. Import Bookmarks from an HTML file

Any luck?

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No luck. The backup file doesn't have any of the bookmarks. Do you know if there is anyway Mozilla automatically saves even with out a sync?

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Firefox definitely doesn't copy your bookmarks to Mozilla or anyone else unless you set it up.

Did your recovered backup include a places.sqlite file? Perhaps it's also mostly empty, but probably worth a search.

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Note that current Firefox versions show the number of bookmarks in the JSON backup as part of the file name in the bookmarkbackups folder (see xxxx: bookmarks-####-##-##_xxxx.json).

Do you have any JSON backup with a number that is large enough to have all the bookmarks?

You can check for problems with the places.sqlite database file in the Firefox profile folder in case you restored this file (sqlite database files can easily get corrupted with a crash).