I have an old drive with my Mozilla Firefox bookmarks on it that I require, they are the sidebar bookmarks I am referring to. I have looked for hours but canno
I am trying to load my FF sidebar bookmarks from my old drive onto my new computer. I personally did not make a backup of any sort of FF, but I assume FF does automatically so it can load the sidebar bookmarks when restarted. I figure those sidebar bookmarks must be stored somewhere that can be accessed and loaded onto the new drive. I can find previous sessions but they only has a few bookmarks saved, I had hundreds prior to the computer going dead. I ran windows 7 on the old drive the new computer has windows 8, not sure if that makes any difference. Really appreciate any help.
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OK, thanks for all the help, I have it all sussed. I have looked at my other computers and find that the .json files of 8 & 9KB that have been saved on my drive are very small and only have 10 or so book marks, they should be around 200KB . I have no idea why they have saved so small but something has not worked. The data was there all the time (even tho it was small) but I was not aware of the size they should have been. The links above are very good and helpful. I hope this helps others going down this same track. Thank you again for all the replies, I hope this turns out to be a very informative thread for others.
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hello trophy, can you locate your firefox profile folder on your old drive?
it is usually found in C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile folder>. within that is a subfolder labelled bookmarkbackups with a number of .json files in it which contain automated backups/daily snapshots of all your bookmarks in firefox.
you can transfer such a file to your new computer and import it to your current installation through firefox > bookmarks > show all bookmarks > import & backup > restore > choose file...
Thank you Philipp for the speedy reply. Yes I can access those .json files I have 12 of them of 8 & 9 KB each. These files only have about 10 bookmarks in each of them. These .json files contain the sites I visited on a particular day. There must be a large file somewhere that has all the bookmarks.
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the places.sqlite file within the profile folder is the file that holds the actual bookmarks & history information. you can try to copy that from your old drive into your current profile (while firefox isn't running) and hope that it contains all of your data...
OK I have located that file 10240KB, copied and pasted to the correct folder, opened FF but the book marks do not show. What am I doing wrong?
this & the small bookmarkbackups.json files would indicate that the old profile didn't store more than the handful of bookmarks - did you use any bookmark related extensions like PlainOldFavorites on your old HDD?
No I did not have any bookmark extension that I installed or are aware of.
If you have the old drive installed, e.g. in a caddy or as an additional internal HDD you can point Firefox at the old Profile, by using a commandline or a shortcut, and run Firefox from that Profile. That it will permit you to verify what bookmarks are in the old HDD profile.
John99 As it turns out I do have the drive in a doc, What I am not sure of is which old file will I load using this method?
You need to find your Firefox profile.
That is easiest with Firefox running, but in this case you are looking for a separate old profile. Probably you only have the one profile on the old disk. (If you have more than one OS account you will have multiple profiles)
- Try searching for the File places.ini that will be near the profile and will actually list the profiles.
- Also try looking for the file places.sqlite
- There will be one instance of that in each profile
- It is the main bookmarks database.
- Note the profile manager may be set up to use a choice of alternative profiles.
CARE always manually backup bookmarks before (and after) any restore attempt. Be aware restores destroy existing bookmarks
See also
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OK, thanks for all the help, I have it all sussed. I have looked at my other computers and find that the .json files of 8 & 9KB that have been saved on my drive are very small and only have 10 or so book marks, they should be around 200KB . I have no idea why they have saved so small but something has not worked. The data was there all the time (even tho it was small) but I was not aware of the size they should have been. The links above are very good and helpful. I hope this helps others going down this same track. Thank you again for all the replies, I hope this turns out to be a very informative thread for others.
Thanks for posting back. Glad to know it is working again.
Not too sure what you found in the end, but you do say this issue is now solved.
Now may be a good time to take the precaution of backing up your complete Firefox Profile (including places.sqlite) and manually backing up your bookmarks as .json files
- Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles
- Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer
As you mention other computers you could consider using Firefox sync. That includes the ability to synchronise bookmarks between devices so that they are effectively backups.
However do not rely totally on sync. The feature may not be 100% reliable and development of this has ceased. It is likely to be replaced by a newer feature at some future date, that may include a proper server backup system.
- How do I set up Sync on my computer? (There are also several other related articles)