This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Cannot restore "Old Firefox Data"... How do I get my boomarks back???

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

Ophilia535
Ophilia535
more options

Husband was on my laptop when a window popped up saying that it was updating Firefox to make it faster. Everything shut down and when he opened Firefox back up, all of my profile info was gone. Bookmarks, settings, history, etc... I NEED MY BOOKMARKS BACK!!! I have reviewed all of the threads on this topic and nothing has worked so far. There are no saved restore points under the bookmarks toolbar. There IS a new folder on my desktop titled "Old Firefox Data" but I cannot figure out how to restore the information in it to my current Firefox profile. One thread says to refresh the profile under Menu>Help>Troubleshooting Information and that all of the old info will be automatically imported. It was not. Another thread said to create a new profile and manually import the data by copy/pasting. It said that the folder titled "places.sqlite" contains the bookmark data so I need to copy that and paste it into the folder opened through menu>Help>Troubleshooting Information>Show Folder. That didn't work either. I don't know what else to do!!! PLEASE HELP!!! I'm running on Windows 7.

Husband was on my laptop when a window popped up saying that it was updating Firefox to make it faster. Everything shut down and when he opened Firefox back up, all of my profile info was gone. Bookmarks, settings, history, etc... I NEED MY BOOKMARKS BACK!!! I have reviewed all of the threads on this topic and nothing has worked so far. There are no saved restore points under the bookmarks toolbar. There IS a new folder on my desktop titled "Old Firefox Data" but I cannot figure out how to restore the information in it to my current Firefox profile. One thread says to refresh the profile under Menu>Help>Troubleshooting Information and that all of the old info will be automatically imported. It was not. Another thread said to create a new profile and manually import the data by copy/pasting. It said that the folder titled "places.sqlite" contains the bookmark data so I need to copy that and paste it into the folder opened through menu>Help>Troubleshooting Information>Show Folder. That didn't work either. I don't know what else to do!!! PLEASE HELP!!! I'm running on Windows 7.

All Replies (2)

FredMcD
FredMcD
more options

Look on your desktop. Do you see a folder called; Old Firefox?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

You can use the Bookmarks Manager to restore the bookmarks from a JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder in the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop.

  • Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import & Backup > Restore

Browse to the bookmarkbackups folder in the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop.

You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:

If you have an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop then you can recover some personal data from a recent profile in that folder. Firefox will try to recover data like bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, saved form data, tabs, personal dictionary automatically when you use the Refresh feature to create a new profile. You can backup files like these in the current Firefox profile folder to backup specific data. You can copy files like these to the current Firefox profile folder to recover specific data.

  • bookmarks and history: places.sqlite
  • bookmark backups: JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder
  • SQLite files like cookies.sqlite (cookies) and formhistory.sqlite (saved form data)
  • logins.json and key3.db (decryption key) for Passwords saved in the Password Manager
  • cert8.db for stored intermediate certificates (Certificate Manager)
  • persdict.dat for words you added to the spelling checker dictionary
  • permissions.sqlite and possibly content-prefs.sqlite for Permissions and Site Preferences
  • sessionstore.js for open tabs and pinned tabs and tab groups