Lost an important folder in Bookmarks
An important folder disappeared in the root of my Bookmarks a few days ago. If I do a Search at the top of the Bookmarks Sidebar on the info associated with various Bookmarks that are missing, it appears the folder is there but misplaced somehow. In the Search info, the location of the URL is not listed in Bookmarks, if it were it would be easy to find where the URL is. I have selected Sort BY Name but and looked around in some folders but that hasn't helped find it.
If I had IE 11, all I would need to do is find a previous Favorites file, open it and and drag and drop the missing folder into the Favorites but I cannot do that with Firefox. (It would be very nice if I could since I have many backups of Bookmarks.) Since I discovered the one missing or misplaced folder in Bookmarks, I have added more URLS to my Bookmarks so using the Restore option will not be good unless I can somehow bring back in folders that I have updated since.
Because there appears to be NO phone Support by Mozilla, which is very poor, I cannot get this quickly resolved. I am running Windows 10 (1809) and have Firefox version 66.0.3 (64-bit).
How can I find what appears to be a misplaced folder in my Bookmarks or restore it and keep my later saved Bookmarks?
Thanks
Chosen solution
Note that if you notice you lost bookmarks or accidentally deleted a bookmark and you haven't closed Firefox then try "Organize > Undo" in the bookmarks manager (Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks) to undo this action and restore bookmark(s) you deleted accidentally or otherwise lost or misplaced. You may have to use Undo more than once (Firefox keeps a full undo history for the current session).
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You posted this question before on the Support Forum Contributors forum (thread has been moved to Lost Threads).
Did you try the suggestions I posted in that thread in case you got a mail ?
You can set focus to the left panel in the Bookmarks Manager (Library) that shows all folders and select an item where you want the search to start and then quickly press the first two characters of this lost folder name to jump to this folder. If necessary repeat until you notice the missing folder.
You can open a bookmark in a tab and click the highlighted star to open the "Edit This Bookmark" dialog. Open the folder tree via the right most arrow outside the folder field and use the scroll bar to locate the highlighted (selected) folder in the full folder tree.
I tried it but I couldn't find the missing folder which I believe was named Hardware, Misc.
What if the missing folder is inside another folder (is a subfolder)? This method wouldn't find it would it? What if the folder somehow got deleted, although I certainly did not intentionally delete it?
Thanks
In the left pane in the Bookmarks Manager (Library) are all folders expanded and you should be able to find this folder. If you set focus in this left panel and press the 'h' a few times then you should cycle through all folder names that start with a 'h. If you remember a bookmarked page in this folder or still have one in the history then do a search in the history.
If you haven't bookmarked many pages recently then you can try to restore a recent JSON backup.
- Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks -> Import & Backup -> Restore
See also:
In the Bookmarks Library, the folders are not expanded on my computer.
You can export the bookmarks to an HTML file and open this file in a text editor or in a Firefox tab to see if that allows to locate the folder.
There is no option to select which Bookmark to Export so if I cannot find it in the current one, I know I could find it in an older Bookmark. Is there a way to Export older Bookmarks?
WCarp7 said
There is no option to select which Bookmark to Export so if I cannot find it in the current one, I know I could find it in an older Bookmark. Is there a way to Export older Bookmarks?
When you export, Firefox create an enormous long web page with all your current bookmarks. If you find the bookmark in that page, you can scroll up to see where it is now and hopefully find where it is in the folder hierarchy that way.
Do the export so you at least have it for reference just in case.
If you need to go back in time, Firefox creates approximately two weeks of daily backups, and I have a converter to decompress the backup and generate an HTML file. The converter is over here: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html
You also have the option to restore one of the old backups. HOWEVER, it rolls your bookmarks back to that date and you will lose new bookmarks you have saved since that date. If you accept that trade-off, see: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer.
Chosen Solution
Note that if you notice you lost bookmarks or accidentally deleted a bookmark and you haven't closed Firefox then try "Organize > Undo" in the bookmarks manager (Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks) to undo this action and restore bookmark(s) you deleted accidentally or otherwise lost or misplaced. You may have to use Undo more than once (Firefox keeps a full undo history for the current session).
After doing a lot of looking, I eventually found the Bookmark! The HTML file was in a strange order that didn't accurately resemble the displayed Bookmarks and was located in a place I would never think it would be.
I found that the Bookmarks HTML file was rather large---53.1 MBs.
Thank you for your assistance!
The Bookmarks HTML backup includes website favicons and this icon data adds most to the size of the file (a JSON backup doesn't include icon data). You can see this icon data as a base64 encode data URI.