Recover Firefox Lost Bookmarks
Most time of the day I surf through many web sites & come across many interesting articles / posts which can be useful in future. Like every web user I bookmark all these URLs. I use both Xmarks & Mozilla Weave to keep bookmark backedup, as bookmark is really important for me I do not wish to take any chance to loose it.
Today by mistake I lost one of my bookmark folder. Ofcouse, I wasn’t worried as I had multiple backup on Xmarks. All I had to do was to restore old backup from Xmarks. Rather restoring old backup from Xmarks I started looking for alternatives to recover bookmarks. While searching I endedup on this link which describes how to recover lost Firefox bookmarks without using any additional extension.
* In Firefox 1.5 and above, five daily bookmark backup files are saved in the bookmarkbackups folder, located in the Firefox profile folder. You must recover one of these five backups before they are overwritten by newer versions.
* In Firefox 2 and below, and in other Mozilla browsers, bookmarks are stored in the file “bookmarks.html”, located in the profile folder. There is also a “bookmarks.html” file in the program folder, but this one is only a template and does not hold your bookmarks. To make sure you have the right file, you can open the bookmarks.html file or any bookmark backup file using “File -> Open File” from the menu (see above).
* Starting in Firefox 3, bookmarks are stored in the places.sqlite file and bookmarks*.html files are only used for importing and exporting. As of Firefox 3 Beta 5 bookmarkbackup files are stored in JSON format.
As per above description all you need to do is to restore old .json files from Bookmarks => Organize Bookmarks => Import and Backup => Restore => select date (to restore backup of that particular date).
This is how you can recover your Bookmarks from JSON files.
In case you wish to restore JSON file of another computer / profile.
Copy JSON file from source location as mentioned below.
JSON file location ~home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILE/bookmarkbackups/
To find profile path cat ~home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini
To restore
Bookmarks => Organize Bookmarks => Import and Backup => Restore => Choose File..
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Thanks for this post. Because of it I was able to save 4 hours of work in creating bookmarks that I thought had been lost!