Where are my bookmarks?

March 31, 2004 4:08 PM

My Mozilla bookmarks are gone! For easy access, I place links to my favorite sites in a toolbar. The bar is still there - it has icons for Home and Bookmarks on the left - but all my links are missing. I didn't delete them, I didn't switch profiles, and I didn't disable them, at least not intentionally. I'm using Mozilla 1.3.1 (yeah, yeah...). I tried dragging a new link to the toolbar, but it didn't show up. What's going on? Where did my links go? How can I get them back?
posted by punishinglemur to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Just links in the toolbar are gone? It may be a problem with the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. Can you see any of the links by going through the bookmarks manager?
posted by rhapsodie at 4:25 PM on March 31, 2004

Oh, I forgot to mention that. All of my bookmarks are gone too. But while I can add new webpages to my bookmarks, I cannot add them to the toolbar.
posted by punishinglemur at 4:36 PM on March 31, 2004

Okay, you know Mozilla salts its profiles? Well, it has a tendency to forget where the heck it put 'em. Restoring your profile can be pretty laborious

After the mail app lost my profile for the 20th time, I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird, and it hasn't happened since. [knock on wood]
posted by keswick at 4:43 PM on March 31, 2004

Pure speculation, but have you verified that the bookmarks file still exists and is uncorrupted? Mozilla, Firebird, et al parse a plaintext HTML file entitled bookmarks.html to generate your bookmark lists, and you should be able to locate this file somewhere on your hard drive.

Try loading bookmarks.html in Mozilla itself (File > Open File) and see if the structure is intact. If the list somehow corrupted itself in a noticeable way, you can open the file in your text editor of choice and correct the errors.

Assuming you're using windows, you may also want to set up a Scheduled Task to copy that file to a backup directory on a nightly basis in case of similar incidents in the future.
posted by Danelope at 4:59 PM on March 31, 2004

The bookmarks.html file only has the test item I added a few minutes ago. If I can add items to my bookmarks list, why can't I add them to the links toolbar?
posted by punishinglemur at 5:07 PM on March 31, 2004

Go into the Bookmark Manager (Ctrl+B), create a new folder, select it, and go to View > Set as Personal Toolbar Folder. Then try dragging a link onto the toolbar.

If all of your bookmarks are verifiably gone, you may want to just back up and then delete your existing bookmarks.html file, to ensure that no file/HTML corruption lingers there to foul things up again.
posted by Danelope at 5:19 PM on March 31, 2004

Thanks for the tip, Danelope, toolbar works now.
posted by punishinglemur at 5:27 PM on March 31, 2004

I've been having similar symptoms with Mozilla 1.3.1, except that all my bookmarks are still there, and bookmarks.html looks fine. Danelope solved my problem too, and I didn't even have to ask.
posted by fuzz at 5:31 PM on March 31, 2004

And upgrade to 1.6 or 1.7b, for crying out loud! <grin>
posted by Danelope at 5:34 PM on March 31, 2004