What prompted you to try to restore backups? What were the circumstances and timing of finding your bookmarks missing? Have you noticed any other data loss, e.g., settings reset to default, add-ons missing?

places.sqlite is a database file that stores both history and bookmarks. While you could install a SQLite utility to view the file contents, that probably is not so useful now because if the bookmarks were in there, you would see them in Firefox.

If you have an older backup of your profile folder, you probably could salvage bookmarks from there.

(If you haven't made a backup recently, it's probably a good idea. To back up Firefox, see Backing up your information. You can copy the entire Profiles folder somewhere outside the Mozilla folder.)

Thank you for your reply.

When I knew my hard drive had problems I backed up with Norton. I had no problem restoring all data to a new drive except for bookmarks. I found no backup file in the bookmarkbackups folder.

Geeksquad restored all data from the old hard drive and it wasn't there either. I haven't noticed any other data loss. The only possibility I can think of is that I may have deleted the file accidentally from the data restored from the old drive. In which case I should restore again from the old drive.

I had hundreds of bookmarks. Is the 10 MB in places.sqlite likely to contain this amount of data. How much trouble would it be to use a SQLite utility to view the file contents?

My places.sqlite on this PC is 30MB, but I don't clear history very often, so that isn't necessarily comparable.

I tried a couple of SQLite browsers, at least one stand-alone and at least one Firefox add-on. I remember thinking they were finicky, but I was eventually able to view the data I wanted to see. I can't recall whether it was an option to export it.

Does your old drive (or backup) have your earlier places.sqlite file? What you might do is create a new Firefox profile in your current installation, then replace the contents of that new profile folder with the contents of the old folder in your backup. (The idea behind replacing the contents is not to change the name of the new folder.) Hopefully that will have your bookmarks and you can export them (or just continue in your old profile).

To create a new profile using Firefox's profile manager, check out this article: Managing profiles | How to | Firefox Help.

Did you check the file sizes of other JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder? There should be 10 JSON backup in that folder and maybe an older version with a larger (largest) file size has them all.

You can't place places.sqlite in the bookmarkbackups or restore bookmarks from the SQLite database file.