Mar
13
Fixing Your Firefox Bookmarks
If you have ever started Firefox and found that it has lost your bookmarks, don’t worry…the solution is simple:
- Find your Firefox profile. On Win2000/XP, it will be located at C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in a folder called something like [random characters].default.
Note #1: if you have multiple profiles, you will see multiple folders here. If you don’t know which one you were using, see http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile for information on managing profiles. That page also includes profile locations for older Windows versions, Mac OS, and Linux.
Note #2: If you can’t see your Application Data folder, try Tools>Folder Options>View Tab and make sure that “Show Hidden Files and Folders” is selected. - Open the profile folder. You should now see a bunch of files and folders. We are only interested in two things: bookmarks.html, which contains your bookmarks as you currently see them, and the bookmarkbackups folder, which contains older versions of bookmarks.html.
- Open the bookmarkbackups folder. Find the file named with the last date that you had the right bookmarks (e.g. bookmarks-2006-12-07.html).
Note: these are normal HTML files…you can open them up in Firefox to see exactly how your bookmarks looked when that file was created. - Copy the file that you selected (Ctrl-C), go back up a directory to the profiles folder, and paste it (Ctrl-V).
- Delete bookmarks.html.
- Rename the file you pasted in Step 4 to bookmarks.html.
- Close Firefox if it is running and restart it.
- You should now see your restored bookmarks. Enjoy!
