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unable to restore lost bookmarks

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by FredMcD

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My firefox session was closed while I was away from my computer -- i do not know why. When i restarted firefox my previous session was restored but all my bookmarks had disappeared. I followed the procedure to restore from the auto backups and found 15 backup files from various days. I tried to restore the most recent but got a message "Unable to restore backup file". what could cause this and is there any way to recover the backup bookmark file(s)?

My firefox session was closed while I was away from my computer -- i do not know why. When i restarted firefox my previous session was restored but all my bookmarks had disappeared. I followed the procedure to restore from the auto backups and found 15 backup files from various days. I tried to restore the most recent but got a message "Unable to restore backup file". what could cause this and is there any way to recover the backup bookmark file(s)?
Attached screenshots

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Sometimes the jsonlz4 files get corrupted. Do this now and then;

Open the Bookmarks Manager; Press the Alt or F10 key to bring up the toolbar, and select Bookmarks. Hot key is <Control> (Mac=<Command>) <Shift> B. Firefox 84+ <Control> (Mac=<Command>) <Shift> O.

Once the window is open, at the top of the page, press the button labeled Import and Backup. Select Export Bookmarks To HTML, and follow the prompts and save it to a HTML file. Copy the file to another computer/profile. Repeat the instructions above, BUT select Import Bookmarks From HTML.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-bookmarks-from-backup-or-move-them

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmarks

Mozilla search: Import {web link}

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http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_process_the_backup_file_-_Firefox

jscher2000 has a tool on his website to extract out your bookmarks and save them to an HTML-format bookmark export file. If you want to try it, here is the page:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/bookbackreader.html

To open the bookmarkbackups folder in Finder, use the "Open in Finder" button in the first table on the Troubleshooting Information page, and double-click into bookmarkbackups where you should see several dated files. From there you can drag and drop onto the conversion tool.

To import the HTML file, see the steps in this article: Import Bookmarks from an HTML file.