Firefox Bookmarks

Yesterday, the power went off for a couple of seconds with my PC on. Upon restart, an apparent new version of Firefox appeared, which I okayed, and then I was taken to a new home page (Google Search) and all my bookmarks were gone. Any help on getting my bookmarks back would be greatly appreciated. I have restored my original home page.

 

Close Firefox
Try Start>Run type in %appdata% and hit OK
In window that opens go to Mozilla folder then Firefox>Profiles>####.default

Rename the file bookmarks.html to bookmarks.old. Then rename bookmarks.bak to bookmarks.html

If these bookmarks don't go far enough back in time; you should also have a bookmarkbackup folder that contains older bookmark files. Pick one and move and rename it to bookmarks.html in the ####.default folder.

**If you don't have show file extensions enabled you will probably need to do it so that you can see the .bak or .html extensions. In any explorer window Tools>Folder Options>View tab> uncheck the box for "Hide extensions for known file types"

 

If you've restarted Firefox since this happened, bookmarks.bak will be no good - it will have been overwritten with the new default bookmarks that you have now - but the bookmarkbackup folder has backups going 5 days back.

 

I got it done but it wasn't easy. After doing a few things with renaming the bookmark file, upon trying to open Firefox, I would get the message "Firefox already open, etc. After solving that problem, I moved the bookmark file to my documents and then imported the file. I'm back to normal now...thanks for the help. I'm going to export my bookmarks to another file periodically from now on.

 

Backing up your bookmarks is highly recommended, even better is to back up your entire Firefox profile, see Profile backup - MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

 

I've automated the backup of my Firefox profile. If you're interested, the code is below. Should only take a minor adjustment for your machine.

Code:

Option Explicit

'**************************************************************************
'*				Variable Declaration And Initialization
'**************************************************************************

Dim o_filesys, o_shell
dim v_day, v_month, v_year, v_pfold, v_cfold

const c_sourcedir = "\\[I]computername[/I]\c$\Documents and Settings\[I]useraccount[/I]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\"
const c_destdir = "\\[I]computername[/I]\d$\Backup\Mozilla Firefox Profile\"

Set o_filesys = CreateObject ("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set o_shell = createobject ("WScript.Shell")

'**************************************************************************
'*				Function Definition
'**************************************************************************

sub terminate()
	set o_filesys = nothing
	set o_shell = nothing
	WScript.Quit()
end sub

sub folder_check (p_folder, p_create)
	if (o_filesys.folderexists(p_folder) = false) then
		if (p_create = true) then
			o_filesys.createfolder(p_folder) ' If not found, attempt creation
			if (o_filesys.folderexists(p_folder) = false) then
				terminate() 'If still not found after creation, terminate
			end if
		else
			terminate()
		end if
	end if
end sub

Sub prelim_check ()
	v_day = day(date())
	v_month = monthname(month(date()))
	v_year = year(date())
	v_pfold = v_month & " " & v_year
	v_month = left(v_month, 3)
	v_cfold = v_month & " " & v_day & " " & v_year	

	folder_check c_sourcedir, false
	folder_check c_destdir, true
	folder_check c_destdir & v_pfold, true
	folder_check c_destdir & v_pfold & "\" & v_cfold , true
End Sub

'**************************************************************************
'*				Main Program Execution
'**************************************************************************

prelim_check()
o_shell.run "xcopy """ & c_sourcedir & "*.*""" & " """ & c_destdir & v_pfold & "\" & v_cfold & "\*.*""" & " /ekidcy"

terminate()

All you would have to do is copy this into notepad, change computername to the name of your machine, useraccount to the name of the account you log in as, (and possibly the destination drive - not everyone has a D: drive like I do) and save as filename.vbs, and you would have a program that backs up your Firefox profile. I've put a shortcut to this script in my startup folder, so I get a new copy everytime I log in.

 

Thanks for the input.

 

Steve_East9 is absolutely correct. The article I linked to previously includes a set of links to all the established backup utilities. I use Bookmark Backup myself, it's very reliable, and easy to use.