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Most of my bookmarks disappeared and restore does not bring them back. How do I get my bookmarks back and how do I keep this from happening again?

  • 8 tontu
  • 4 am na jafe-jafe bii
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  • i mujjee tontu mooy annoyed12345

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The folder that I added to the bookmarks menu has disappeared (along with the subfolders in it). The bookmarks I have that were not organized in a folder (just listed on the bookmarks menu) are still on the bookmarks menu. Tags from the lost bookmarks are still there, but they are empty.

The "recently bookmarked" option just lists the bookmarks I had added to the bookmark menu (but not put in folders) and the default bookmarks from Mozilla and Windows Live. There were many things in the lost bookmarks that were more recent than these.

I tried restoring from an automatic backup and that didn't work. My browser history seems accurate though.

I only have one firefox profile.

The folder that I added to the bookmarks menu has disappeared (along with the subfolders in it). The bookmarks I have that were not organized in a folder (just listed on the bookmarks menu) are still on the bookmarks menu. Tags from the lost bookmarks are still there, but they are empty. The "recently bookmarked" option just lists the bookmarks I had added to the bookmark menu (but not put in folders) and the default bookmarks from Mozilla and Windows Live. There were many things in the lost bookmarks that were more recent than these. I tried restoring from an automatic backup and that didn't work. My browser history seems accurate though. I only have one firefox profile.

All Replies (8)

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See if the bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar shown within the bookmarks sidebar ("Ctrl+B") show the folders and bookmarks as you changed them to

I would expect a corrupt localstore.rdf file, see

If bookmarks still don't work properly afterwards, I would have tried taking a bookmarks backup and restoring it which is more up to date than restoring from from one already saved,. But without even doing that you can reindex everything in bookmarks by installing an extension, and I would run all of the options separately or at once.

If that does not work then start from the top of that page as you do not want to lose your history.

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That is most likely a problem with the file places.sqlite that stores the bookmarks and the history.
So you can start with that.

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I don't think it is the corrupt localstore.rdf file since none of the problems listed in that article are happening. The disappeared folder and bookmarks do not appear in the sidebar or in the menu.

I can still add bookmarks and the back/forward navigation still works. I do not want to do anything that will delete my history.

I downloaded the places.sqlite extension suggested and tried "Rebuild Indices." That did not bring my missing bookmarks back.

I had it do the "Deep Check" preset and this is what it told me

> Integrity check + The database is sane > Coherence check + The database is coherent > Orphans expiration + Database cleaned up > Vacuum Initial database size is 40960 KiB + The database has been vacuumed Final database size is 40960 KiB > Statistics Database size is 40960 KiB user_version is 12 page_size is 4096 cache_size is 43181 journal_mode is wal synchronous is 1 History can store a maximum of 58957 unique pages Table moz_bookmarks has 104 records Table moz_bookmarks_roots has 5 records Table moz_keywords has 0 records Table sqlite_sequence has 0 records Table moz_favicons has 2015 records Table moz_annos has 113 records Table moz_anno_attributes has 13 records Table moz_items_annos has 34 records Table moz_places has 53400 records Table moz_historyvisits has 85428 records Table moz_inputhistory has 448 records Table sqlite_stat1 has 15 records Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_bookmarks_roots_1 Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_keywords_1 Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_favicons_1 Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_anno_attributes_1 Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_inputhistory_1 Index moz_bookmarks_itemindex Index moz_bookmarks_parentindex Index moz_bookmarks_itemlastmodifiedindex Index moz_places_faviconindex Index moz_places_hostindex Index moz_places_visitcount Index moz_places_frecencyindex Index moz_places_lastvisitdateindex Index moz_historyvisits_placedateindex Index moz_historyvisits_fromindex Index moz_historyvisits_dateindex Index moz_annos_placeattributeindex Index moz_items_annos_itemattributeindex Index moz_places_url_uniqueindex Index moz_bookmarks_guid_uniqueindex Index moz_places_guid_uniqueindex Trigger moz_bookmarks_beforedelete_v1_trigger

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Did you try to move out all places files and make Firefox restore the bookmarks from a JSON backup to see if that brings back the lost bookmarks?

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Restoring from the earliest auto-save backup I have (from December 2nd, 9 days ago) does not fix the problem. It is possible that my folder disappeared before the 2nd, but I only noticed it today and I'm pretty sure I've used bookmarks from that folder in the last week.

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Firefox 8 should have 10 backups.

You can try to open the backups in a text editor or in Firefox (you may need to copy and add a .txt file extension) and do a search for that lost bookmarks or do a text search (file content) on Windows for bookmarks that you lost to see which backup(s) have the missing data.
Make a backup of all present JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder in the Firefox profile folder.

You can use this button to go to the Firefox profile folder:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Open Containing Folder
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None of the backups have my missing bookmarks folder. I guess that must mean it was lost before December 2nd.

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Have the same problem but I 100% know I used bookmarks from my subfolder that disappeared. I use them every day and specifically remember using it today. Now the folder has vanished and it is not in any of the restore/backup files. Wonderful.