Firefox uninstalled itself unprompted and wiped my bookmarks; I would like to recover them and have not been successsful following the advice available on the support center site
Hello,
This morning Firefox stopped loading new tabs, which usually means it is due for an update and restart. On my work computer, updates are managed by my organization, so I cannot prompt it to check for updates directly, but rather can just restart the application and it updates once closed. Today when I closed the window then clicked the shortcut to reopen, it notified me the exe file had been removed and prompted me to open the Windows store and reinstall, which I did. I have no indication as to why it uninstalled. All of my bookmarks and other history appear to have been wiped.
I have been trying on the support site to see if this data is recoverable, but nothing has panned out so far.
I have used Firefox as my primary browser for almost twenty years and frequently encourage friends and family to use it if they don't already. I have never experienced anything like this before. I am hopeful somebody will be able to assist me where reading through support center options hasn't yet, but if this is not resolvable, I'm done- the crash helpfully wiped everything clean, after all.
Any suggestions or response is greatly appreciated. Best, Z
الحل المُختار
z10pc, hopefully the uninstall did not delete the original profile folder from the hard drive.
Firefox maintains backups of bookmarks in a folder named "bookmarkbackups" within a profile folder. So you could try searching the hard drive for folders with this name, and see if you can find the backups made by the original profile.
If nothing is found, then you might want to check that the search process can find hidden files and folders.
The backups will have names of the form "bookmarks-*.jsonlz4". So alternatively you could try searching for filenames matching this pattern.
If you find any such backups, then you can import them via the "Import and Backup" menu in the bookmarks library. See the "Restoring from backups" section here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-bookmarks-from-backup-or-move-them (But note the part "Caution: Restoring bookmarks from a backup will overwrite your current set of bookmarks with the ones in the backup file".)
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الحل المُختار
z10pc, hopefully the uninstall did not delete the original profile folder from the hard drive.
Firefox maintains backups of bookmarks in a folder named "bookmarkbackups" within a profile folder. So you could try searching the hard drive for folders with this name, and see if you can find the backups made by the original profile.
If nothing is found, then you might want to check that the search process can find hidden files and folders.
The backups will have names of the form "bookmarks-*.jsonlz4". So alternatively you could try searching for filenames matching this pattern.
If you find any such backups, then you can import them via the "Import and Backup" menu in the bookmarks library. See the "Restoring from backups" section here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-bookmarks-from-backup-or-move-them (But note the part "Caution: Restoring bookmarks from a backup will overwrite your current set of bookmarks with the ones in the backup file".)
It worked! Thank you so much, this has been a huge headache all day. I still wish I had any idea why this happened, but I will take my wins where I can. Once again, thank you, this is such a help and relief.
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