When you load a bookmarked page, does the transparent star in the address bar turn yellow? If you click the star, then click the downward-pointing icon on the far right of the line that starts with Folder, the dialog should highlight the current location in the menu hierarchy. Any information there?

Thanks for the reply, J. As it happens, the problem has sort of fixed itself. I loaded FF today, saw your message, tried to load a known bookmark by typing in the address bar, and got zilch. So I went to the profile folder and saw two files: places.sqlite (dated today) and places.sqlite.corrupt (dated yesterday). I overwrote places.sqlite with my backed up version from a month or so back, restarted FF, and to my amazement all bookmarks have been restored.

So I guess I didn't have a problem after all, other than with a corrupt file.

However, your reply was very useful, because for all the years I've used FF, I've never known what the star was for - D'OH!! It's especially useful to know that you can edit a bookmark from it directly, and see its place in the bookmark hierarchy which as my bookmarks go back to Mosaic days (yes, really!) has become quite large and deep.

Very much on a tangent, is there a way that I can directly view and manage .sqlite files? I've not used SQLite before, and my C is very rusty, so do you know if there's a client application that can query SQLite files? Perhaps a bit like phpMyAdmin does to MySQL files. Feel free to ignore this Q, or to tell me to post it to a new thread - I'm just being curious, and trying to get 'under the bonnet' of FF :o)

Fred

Hi Fred, I use the SQLite Manager extension to peer into Firefox's SQLite databases. If you find a database diagram or other documentation showing the purpose of all those fields and the relationship of the tables, I'd love to see it.

You can check for problems with the places.sqlite database file in the Firefox profile folder if the problem returns.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks_history_and_toolbar_buttons_not_working_-_Firefox

Thanks, cor-el, that's a very useful document. I was particularly interested to learn about the daily JSON bookmark backup.

Thanks, Jefferson, that's a really, really handy extension.

Here's couple of links that may be of interest.

• http://www.howtogeek.com/69051/stupid-geek-tricks-hacking-the-firefox-profile-data-storage/
• http://joshmoulin.com/topics/digital-forensics-incident-response/87-finding-deleted-urls-in-mozilla-firefox-places-sqlite-file.html

I think they are current, but IIRC the places structure may have changed at one stage a couple of years ago.