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Cant access old profile folder after Refresh

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After updating Firefox to V.53.03 it crashed every time I started it. Other programs also stopped responding. I did a Refresh after making sure it would save all my important information. Now It will not restore my open tabs and there is no history to recreate them from. I tried copying info back from the old profile, but access is denied to the folder. Any suggestions?

After updating Firefox to V.53.03 it crashed every time I started it. Other programs also stopped responding. I did a Refresh after making sure it would save all my important information. Now It will not restore my open tabs and there is no history to recreate them from. I tried copying info back from the old profile, but access is denied to the folder. Any suggestions?

All Replies (4)

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Also bookmarks are gone!!!

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Did you already try shutting down Windows and restarting it? Sometimes this is necessary to release file locks and resolve permission problems.

If that doesn't magically solve the problem:

When you say you did a Refresh, I assume you mean a Firefox refresh and not a Windows refresh. So you have an Old Firefox Data folder on your desktop and that's the one you can't access? Or were you trying to copy from a different folder?

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Yes, a Firefox Refresh. I already did a Windows Restart. I find I now have access to the file, but can't figure out how to restore the information. The help articles here aren't clear to me. I tried copying the last bookmark file into the profile folder, but that changed nothing. I tried swapping the two profile files, but then Firefox couldn't find it. Any other suggestions? What am I not understanding about all this?

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If you want to do a complete roll-back, please see the procedure in this thread:

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1152951

If you only want a few files, it may be faster to copy them individually, but there are some tricks to that. The available files are described in this article: Recovering important data from an old profile. It sounds as though you would be especially interested in:

  • places.sqlite - bookmarks + history
  • recovery.js, previous.js - session history (open tabs)