Hi

Thank you for your question about the Firefox Sync service.

It appears from your question, that you are using Firefox Sync as a back up service. This is not what Sync is designed to do. The Firefox Sync service takes a copy of the data you wish to include and transfers it to a second device (typically a mobile device such as a tablet or a telephone) running a copy of Firefox. The storage in between all attached devices is both temporary and fragile and is not stable enough to be (and is not designed as) a reliable backup service.

If you have a copy of your Firefox profile for desktop Firefox, you may be able to recover your bookmarks and other data. Please have a read of this article.

If you have a copy of your data on a mobile version of Firefox, please follow these instructions to connect it to Firefox Sync to copy your data.

You can check for problems with the places.sqlite database (bookmarks and history) in the Firefox profile folder.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/

See also:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks_history_and_toolbar_buttons_not_working_-_Firefox
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Bookmarks+not+saved#w_fix-the-bookmarks-file

You can check the about:sync-log page via the location/address bar to see if there are recent error logs available.

You can upload a recent log if the log is too big to put in a reply.

• http://pastebin.mozilla.org

Hi Mel, I don't know whether you can recover data on your Mac drive, but if there is some software for that, you might try it. In particular, you are looking for your old bookmarkbackups folder or any erased files whose names match the pattern for backup .jsonlz4 files.

While I don't think Sync is platform specific, you also might try connecting to your Sync account using Firefox on a Mac just in case. If that worked, you could create fresh backup and export files to send to Windows through other means (e.g., shared drive, flash drive, email, etc.).