Recent answers to Folders missing from Bookmarks after update to Firefox 9https://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/9159942012-02-12T06:47:21-08:00Try to export the bookmarks that you recovered from that backup to an HTML file.
Bookmarks > Sho2012-02-12T06:47:21-08:00cor-elhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-309882<p>Try to export the bookmarks that you recovered from that backup to an HTML file.
</p>
<ul><li>Bookmarks &gt; Show All Bookmarks &gt; Import &amp; Backup &gt; Export HTML
</li></ul>
<p>Such a file is easier to manage and importing an HTML merges bookmarks instead of replacing all bookmarks like restoring a JSON backup does.
</p>I looked through bugzilla but came up empty ... but this article has a suggestion:
http://kb.mozill2012-02-12T06:18:59-08:00AliceWymanhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-309871<p>I looked through bugzilla but came up empty ... but this article has a suggestion:
</p><p><a href="http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locked_or_damaged_places.sqlite#If_a_places.sqlite.corrupt_file_exists" rel="nofollow">http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locked_or_damaged_places.sqlite#If_a_places.sqlite.corrupt_file_exists</a>
</p><p><em><strong>If a places.sqlite.corrupt file exists</strong></em>
</p><p><em>If your Firefox profile folder includes a "places.sqlite.corrupt" file, one reported fix is to open the Firefox profile folder and, after closing Firefox completely, delete or rename the places.sqlite file and then <u>rename "places.sqlite.corrupt" to "places.sqlite"</u>. (If you see any other places.sqlite* files, delete those as well, so that only one places.sqlite file remains.) It is possible that certain security or "cleanup" software (e.g., CCleaner) is causing the places.sqlite file corruption. It is also possible that Firefox was not closed properly, as might happen when your computer loses power with Firefox running, which can cause a corrupt places.sqlite file.</em>
</p><p><strong>EDIT:</strong> Never mind. I see from reviewing page 1 that your profile folder didn't contain a places.sqlite.corrupt file. Oh well. I tried.
</p>To all you wonderful helpful people an update (some good news):
It's not the bookmarks per se that a2012-02-10T10:29:37-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-309239<p>To all you wonderful helpful people an update (some good news):
</p><p>It's not the bookmarks per se that are lost, it's all the folders I created in bookmarks that are lost. The loose bookmarks that didn't matter much are all there!
</p><p>Last week I already did all of what you suggested, and much more. I have tried the jsons from current version of FF, from saved version on a backup drive, from saved version on a USB stick, tried them in FF9, re-installed and tried them in FF 3.6.25 in which they were created in the first place, tried them in FF7 on my laptop and tried them in FF10 - ALL STUFFED! I think the auto backup function of FF has been producing corrupted jsons. I did everything that everyone suggested and nothing brought back my folders.
As you can see I'm well past all the basic and usual stuff.
</p><p>Then I had an INSPIRATION:
</p><p>LOGIC:
When I was on Firefox 3.6.25 on 28 January, all my folders displayed.
Then I upgraded to Firefox 9 and still all my folders were displaying while the computer was on. Then I shut down for the night and the folders were gone next day. Logic is that since they were displaying on FF 9 before I shut down, it means the information was still in the Firefox folder somewhere, even though the backups were crap.
Thereafter neither FF 3.6.25 nor 9 nor 10 could read folders but I'd only been trying from the Backups!
</p><p>So I took a copy of the whole Firefox folder from my Application Support bup from 12 January and over-wrote it into the current Application Support, then re-launched FF 3.6.25 and hey presto! The folders from 12 Jan were there. So they must be somewhere in the profile.
</p><p>Next question was: is there any PROFILE FOLDER from Jan 28th or 27th that will work? Haven't found one yet.... meanwhile I am just using my 12 January set of folders and racking my brains to remember the missing 2 weeks work on the internet!
</p><p>Any other suggestions welcome....
</p>Thanks cor-el, I've now tried everything they suggested with bookmarklets etc, nothing works.
Don't2012-01-30T17:42:59-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-304665<p>Thanks cor-el, I've now tried everything they suggested with bookmarklets etc, nothing works.
Don't know what to do next.
</p>See also this MozillaZine forum thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=175282012-01-30T09:12:36-08:00cor-elhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-304574<p>See also this MozillaZine forum thread:
</p>
<ul><li><a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&amp;t=1752835&amp;p=8713165#p8713165" rel="nofollow">http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&amp;t=1752835&amp;p=8713165#p8713165</a>
</li></ul>Oops! Lucy I forgot to ask if it's OK to email you the 2 files, and if you want to give me your emai2012-01-30T07:58:50-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-304565<p>Oops! Lucy I forgot to ask if it's OK to email you the 2 files, and if you want to give me your email address? I'm at dianne@diannetrussell.com, <a href="http://au.linkedin.com/in/diannetrussell" rel="nofollow">http://au.linkedin.com/in/diannetrussell</a>
</p>To Lucy: Here it is Tuesday morning in Adelaide, South Australia, and I have my backup drive out of 2012-01-30T07:38:27-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994?page=2#answer-304559<p>To Lucy: Here it is Tuesday morning in Adelaide, South Australia, and I have my backup drive out of storage. I got the September 2011 Profiles folder, saved it to my desktop and started testing the backup jsons on my re-installed version of Firefox 3.6.25 (in which those September jsons were created originally). Here's the weird bit: it could not load my folders! From a json it made itself! And yet it CAN load my folders from the May 2010 json. So somewhere between May 2010 and September 2011, something went rotten in the barrel.
I have no idea what to do, except to email you my most important bookmarks backup that I can't get to load my folders, plus the May 2010 one that does work, for comparison, and see if you can get them to work in your own Firefox 9.
I tried putting the json into json2html, and the message came back: syntax error.
</p>dianne,
the bookmarks being missing from the backups even though you were using them might make some2012-01-29T00:39:03-08:00Kensiehttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-304048<p>dianne,
</p><p>the bookmarks being missing from the backups even though you were using them might make some sort of sense if you hadn't restarted Firefox in those days. If you're like me you leave your machine running and Firefox open. If you restart Firefox every day then it makes no sense at all.
</p>cor-el:
Re, viewing page source:
I've just been trying what you said but I don't know what you mean2012-01-28T14:48:10-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303944<p>cor-el:
Re, viewing page source:
I've just been trying what you said but I don't know what you mean or what you want me to do with it. What is the goal of this round of instructions - to find recent bookmarks in the text?
I went to Firefox but there is no "Web Developer". There is View -&gt; "Page Source".
I did that and a separate window came up wit all the text in it. I could select Wrap Long Lines.
Under Tools there is no "Web Developer".
Ctrl + U does nothing.
Right click? Are you telling me Windows instructions? I'm on a Mac....
</p><p>This is one of the very last bookmarks I entered before the problem:
<a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/" rel="nofollow">http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/</a>
And there is none of this in the text of the backup from that day and the next.
</p>While I waited for your replies I got busy.
I saved everything from my current Firefox 9.
Then delet2012-01-28T12:09:31-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303911<p>While I waited for your replies I got busy.
I saved everything from my current Firefox 9.
Then deleted everything - the app, the Profile, profile.ini
Then went and got a new .dmg of Firefox 3.6.25 like I had before and installed it.
Using that I have tested restore on every backup file that I have from the old and the new Firefox.
The results are:
An old bookmarks.html from 2008 displays folders fine.
An old bookmarks.json from May 2010 displays folders fine (unfortunately it is way out of date for my current work).
Now here's the interesting bit. You'd think that, in view of that success, Firefox 3.6.25 would be able to load the bookmarks folders from the newer json files that I had before upgrading to Firefox 9. BUT it doesn't. All the jsons from 7 January onwards this year are duds. And yet my bookmarks folders were all there and I ws using them all that time up until Firefox 9 yesterday. Does this mean that the Firefox automatic backup had malfunctioned somewhere from late last year to this January, unbeknownst to me?
</p><p>I can keep all the backups as you suggest, but the only backup files that work are too out of date to be useful to me. That's pretty serious. Gotta get them back from yesterday.
</p><p>Next I'll pull some backup files from a USB stick that I saved to late last year to early this year and test those...
And I will send my bups to bug report unless I remember there being something confidential...
</p>If firefox 9 is refusing to load your bookmarks you might very well have found a bug. Make sure to k2012-01-28T10:56:39-08:00Kensiehttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303901<p>If firefox 9 is refusing to load your bookmarks you might very well have found a bug. Make sure to keep a copy of that file that you know has your bookmarks!
</p><p>I would suggest installing a copy of Firefox 3 somewhere (but not overtop the current 9) and see if it still sees the bookmarks from any of those json files. If so I'd then suggest 2 things:
</p>
<ol><li> File a bug and attach your bookmarks file that has the bookmarks in it. Do note though that this will make your bookmarks public. If there's anything in them you don't want to share don't do this, instead we can try and make a similar set of bookmarks that fails in the same way
</li><li> In Firefox 3 move all those folders back onto the bookmarks toolbar or somewhere else and see if Firefox 9 can then handle those bookmarks.
</li></ol>
<p>If you do any of this advanced testing make sure you keep separate copies of the files and it's best to use two different profiles to avoid problems caused by going back and forth between the versions. Make sure to keep a copy of the file that has the bookmarks in it somewhere safe until we've got it all sorted out!
</p>Firefox will restore the bookmarks from the latest JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder.
If tha2012-01-28T09:33:22-08:00cor-elhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303883<p>Firefox will restore the bookmarks from the latest JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder.<br>
If that backup has been created after you lost those folders then they won't reappear.<br>
You need to check all JSON backups to find one that has the lost bookmarks and then restore the bookmarks using that file.
</p>
<ul><li><a href="http://kb.mozillazine.org/Backing_up_and_restoring_bookmarks_-_Firefox" rel="nofollow">http://kb.mozillazine.org/Backing_up_and_restoring_bookmarks_-_Firefox</a>
</li></ul>Just deleted EVERY file that even has sqlite in the filename, restarted.... NO FOLDERS. Did restore 2012-01-28T09:14:15-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303871<p>Just deleted EVERY file that even has sqlite in the filename, restarted.... NO FOLDERS. Did restore from 27 Jan..... NO FOLDERS.
</p><p>So I've had it with Firefox 9. I'm going back to 3, port all my bookmarks over to Safari....
</p>Just deleted and emptied the 3 places.sqlite files in Library -> App Support -> Firefox, quit2012-01-28T08:52:37-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303866<p>Just deleted and emptied the 3 places.sqlite files in Library -&gt; App Support -&gt; Firefox, quit Firefox and re-launched. No folders.
</p>The search term I used in the document is in the url and the site name as well as the page content, 2012-01-28T08:37:52-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303857<p>The search term I used in the document is in the url and the site name as well as the page content, so should have been there.
I have already bupped the json (and the whole of App Support -&gt; Firefox) onto a dedicated folder on my hard drive desktop.
And I already did a restore from a json backup that should have those missing bookmarks. I used the json backup file from 28th Jan (bbefore the upgrade to 9) and it did not work. So then I did it again with the json backup from 27th Jan and that did not work either. I'm beginning to think it's not the files, it's the very structure of the new Firefox that's the problem.
However I will do a simple json restore one more time, from 26 Jan, and see what happens. The unfortunate thing is that in the last 2 days I have done heaps of work and bookmarked many sites I really need to use.
OK I just did the restore from the 26 January json. No luck, no folders in the Menu, just the loose links I had not yet filed into folders. So it's not me, it's Firefox.
</p>You only see the URLs and names of sites that you've bookmarked in the JSON file and not page conten2012-01-28T08:16:10-08:00cor-elhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303849<p>You only see the URLs and names of sites that you've bookmarked in the JSON file and not page content if that was what you've searched for.
</p><p>It is better to only copy the JSON backup from that backup to a folder on your hard drive and try to restore the bookmarks from a JSON backup that should have the missing bookmarks.<br>
You can inspect the files to see if they have those bookmarks.<br>
Don't restore more than you need as that may cause problems.
</p>P.S. I meant to say, I'm going to play it safe and do that json bookmark backup from the external HD2012-01-28T08:12:54-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303848<p>P.S. I meant to say, I'm going to play it safe and do that json bookmark backup from the external HD onto the Firefox of my MacBook Air, which has almost no new bookmarks on it to worry about.
I just did it, and guess what? NONE OF MY FOLDERS ARE THERE! Info says the MacBook Air version of Firefox is 7.0.1. So it looks like Firefox 3 was the last time that had a decent support for folder structure, or else the programming architecture that handles folders has been so radically altered that later Firefox can't load folders from 3. Do the developers know about this?
</p><p>It cheeses me off that you can't ADD bookmarks to an existing file any more; it just seems to only be able to over-write.
</p><p>That leaves me with the next option: re-installing earlier Firefox on my desktop iMac....I have the jsons backed up, but so here goes....
</p>To Lucy especially - I opened a json in TextEdit (I'm on Mac) and there was a lot of gobbledygook (f2012-01-28T08:01:47-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303844<p>To Lucy especially - I opened a json in TextEdit (I'm on Mac) and there was a lot of gobbledygook (font substitution? or maybe just code..) but I could see the names of things I recognized so did a search in the document for an unusual term from a site I know I bookmarked yesterday, and it wasn't there.
To Cor-el - I'm going to do what you suggest, however I have one trick up my sleeve to try first. I backed up my entire computer onto a 1 TB USB external hard drive on 12 January. The data is therefore old, but it will have my old version of Firefox plus installer and bookmarks bups. So I'm going to re-load it, then see if I can import bookmarks from the latest json of the new dud Firefox. How does that sound?
</p><p>The only problem I can see, and this seems like a really stupid thing Firefox has done, is that the backups are no longer html files, but when you request to import bookmarks, it asks for html files and there is no option to import from json files!! How stupid is that? (I hope you're not one of the developers - if you are, apologies if I have offended). For that matter, in Bookmarks there used to be a handy option to save bookmarks as an html file. That's gone, along with a lot of other great functionality that I miss.
</p>Yes, you need to remove the places.sqlite-shm places.sqlite-wal files as well as those are used as t2012-01-28T06:20:13-08:00cor-elhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303806<p>Yes, you need to remove the places.sqlite-shm places.sqlite-wal files as well as those are used as temp files.
</p><p>You can also open the JSON files in Firefox (File &gt; Open File), but in that case you need to create a copy and change the file extension of the copy to .txt to prevent getting an "Open with" dialog.
</p><p>Use Web Developer &gt; Page Source and View &gt; Wrap Long Lines to see the full text more easily.
</p>
<ul><li>Firefox &gt; Web Developer &gt; Page Source
</li><li>Tools &gt; Web Developer &gt; Page Source (Ctrl+U)
</li><li>Right-click on a web page to open the context menu and select View Page Source
</li></ul>P.S. I don't use Time Machine because it needs half your hard drive, and mine's close to full. And i2012-01-28T05:42:46-08:00diannetrussellhttps://support.mozilla.org/ar/questions/915994#answer-303797<p>P.S. I don't use Time Machine because it needs half your hard drive, and mine's close to full. And if used on a backup drive, all the files and folders are locked in a way that prevents partial updates. Instead I backup manually.
</p>