Recovering Firefox Bookmarks

September 24, 2018 5:36 AM

Unresponsive Firefox on Windows 10 machine. Can I recover bookmarks (or get them back, if I download a new version of Firefox)?

Greetings all. All of a sudden, my Firefox browser won't work on my laptop; its unresponsive (running Windows 10). I click on the firefox icon and nothing happens.

I use both Chrome and Firefox on my laptop but use Chrome for work related stuff and Firefox for personal stuff. I have (had) a lot of personal bookmarks saved under Firefox (sports sites, news, fitness, cooking, etc) and I would hate to have lost them.

is there a way to recover these?

OR, is there a way to download (launch) a new version of firefox without losing bookmarks?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

posted by dbirchum to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Sure. Find your profile folder and copy the file from ‘bookmarkbackups’ with the latest date to somewhere safe. Later, you can re-import the file using Library → Bookmarks → Show all bookmarks → Import and backup → Restore → Choose file.

However, the problem is more likely to be something in the profile itself than in the Firefox installation, so reinstalling may not actually help. You can try using a different profile to see if that fixes it, and if so get rid of the old one. Background
posted by BobInce at 6:12 AM on September 24, 2018

BobInce's way is great for getting the bookmarks back. Firefox periodically offers a Refresh Firefox option; the link includes a button to do just that. But if there's a busted tab trying to reopen in your profile, it may be best to start a new profile.
posted by scruss at 6:17 AM on September 24, 2018

Hi folks -

Thanks for that. I found the bookmark backups folder and copied that info somewhere else. Thanks for that.

Now I am researching the profile issue. I followed the Firefox link that you supplied and tried to open the profile dialog box (as per the directions), but I keep getting an XML parsing error and can't proceed and get into the Profile manager to set up a new one, etc.

Any suggestions?
posted by dbirchum at 6:54 AM on September 24, 2018

Type about:support in the URL bar and go there. It should have the refresh option in the top right corner of the page.

If you want to make a test profile without interfering with your current one, you can do it from within about:profiles (instructions here).
posted by Bangaioh at 9:54 AM on September 24, 2018

Minor aside that doesn't answer your question but might be important: bookmark descriptions are deprecated, they can't be seen in the UI of the latest releases of Firefox (62+, ESR is 60 and still has full support) but they can still be exported to html or json backup files.

A future release will wipe descriptions from the bookmarks database (places.sqlite) so if you have important data stored there please make a backup now.
posted by Bangaioh at 10:20 AM on September 24, 2018