My bookmarks have been rearranged and I cannot change them back
In the last week, all of my bookmarks seem to have been rearranged into a strange and random order. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, syncing with my other products, Firefox's own "refresh". I have rearranged them manually, and then when I go to look at them, they have been rearranged again, back to what I just changed from. I now have something on my bookmarks called Pocket, which seems to have come up since these problems began, but I don't know if that's just coincidence.
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Pocket is an optional service you can use to save links to a reading list on the web and share them with various devices. Although a Pocket item appears on your Bookmarks menu, it isn't actually part of your bookmarks.
It sounds as though you use the Firefox Sync service to share bookmarks between your Windows installation of Firefox and another installation (e.g., on a PC or Android device). Possibly the Sync process could have disordered things... but I'm not very familiar with Sync issues or how to straighten them out.
Could I suggest copying some backup files to a safe location to they don't get cycled out? You might need to use one of them later to roll back the changes to your bookmarks. You can find them as follows:
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.
Double-click into the bookmarkbackups folder and copy the files here to a safe location (e.g., your Documents folder).
Caution: Restoring one of these backup files completely replaces your current set of bookmarks, so if you have added new bookmarks since the time of the backup, those would be overwritten.
To preserve newer bookmarks, we generally suggest creating an export file. Export files can be accessed as web pages for reference, or imported without replacing existing bookmarks (i.e., importing causes duplicates).
More info:
jscher2000, much thanks. I will admit, it took me a while to figure out where you were sending me with the Firefox settings instruction, but once I typed the "about:support" in the browser address bar, that worked best for me. I backed up the bookmarks, and went back to beginning of this month. They're back in their regular order for now.
What was strange was that when I went to "Show all bookmarks", the nav bar on the left gave me the order I normally keep them in, but when I use the drop down "Bookmarks" they were all jumbled. Not sure why or how, but will keep this in my tech file for future reference.
Are you using Sync to sync bookmarks?
You can check for problems with the places.sqlite database file in the Firefox profile folder.
- 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
- Places Maintenance: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/
If you use Sync then best is to disconnect Sync (temporarily) while performing maintenance/repair efforts to the places.sqlite database.