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I inadvertanly did a clean install of W7 without saving existing bookmarks

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I forgot to mark a backup of the bookmarks to a thumbdrive before doing a clean install of W7 to my computer. There is a folder "Windowsold" that the install put on the C drive. Is there any way to recover the bookmarks?

I forgot to mark a backup of the bookmarks to a thumbdrive before doing a clean install of W7 to my computer. There is a folder "Windowsold" that the install put on the C drive. Is there any way to recover the bookmarks?

Chosen solution

If you have C:\Windows.old, you may be in luck.

First, it would be helpful to set Windows to show hidden files and folders. This article has the steps: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files

Then click into:

C:\Windows.old\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Note: there is a cache folder under AppData\Local, but all the important stuff is under AppData\Roaming.

Here you may find one or more semi-randomly named folders. The one with the most recently updated contents probably is the one you want to restore.

This post has my suggested procedure for resurrecting that data in your new installation of Firefox. Please note the use of copy instead of move throughout the process. This allows you to try again if it fails somewhere along the way.

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1024189#answer-638319

Any luck?

Note, if you really ONLY want bookmarks, copy the two latest backups from the old bookmarkbackups folder to a convenient location such as the desktop, then see this article (you'll use "Choose file" on the menu to get to those backups): Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer. Note that this process will replace any new bookmarks you might have saved since installing Firefox again. If you need to preserve those, use the export feature first: Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks.

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Chosen Solution

If you have C:\Windows.old, you may be in luck.

First, it would be helpful to set Windows to show hidden files and folders. This article has the steps: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files

Then click into:

C:\Windows.old\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Note: there is a cache folder under AppData\Local, but all the important stuff is under AppData\Roaming.

Here you may find one or more semi-randomly named folders. The one with the most recently updated contents probably is the one you want to restore.

This post has my suggested procedure for resurrecting that data in your new installation of Firefox. Please note the use of copy instead of move throughout the process. This allows you to try again if it fails somewhere along the way.

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1024189#answer-638319

Any luck?

Note, if you really ONLY want bookmarks, copy the two latest backups from the old bookmarkbackups folder to a convenient location such as the desktop, then see this article (you'll use "Choose file" on the menu to get to those backups): Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer. Note that this process will replace any new bookmarks you might have saved since installing Firefox again. If you need to preserve those, use the export feature first: Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks.