karen9093 said

Hi. Just got a new hard drive.

Your profile is on the old hard drive. Did you copy it to the new drive?

I do not have the old hard drive. The company said it copied everything and that I should have access through their copied file, but I can't locate my bookmarks there. I will look more closely there. In the meantime, is there any way to recover my old bookmarks through Mozilla? Thanks for your help!

karen9093 said

is there any way to recover my old bookmarks through Mozilla?

Only if you were using sync.

I do not have the old hard drive. The company said it copied everything and that I should have access through their copied file,

How/where did they copy the old hard drive data? Did they do a direct copy, or copy everything to a folder?

Firefox uses two locations for the Firefox profile folder, so make sure to look in the correct location. Location used for the main profile that keeps your personal data (Root Directory on about:profiles).

• C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

Location used for the disk cache and other temporary files (Local Directory on about:profiles).

• C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

"AppData" (XP: Application Data; Mac: ~/Library; Linux: ~/.mozilla) is a hidden folder.

See also:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

Thank you all for your help. Everything is gone. I give up.

I am in exactly the same position. After replacement of the motherboard and re-installation of Windows, I find that all my book marks have disappeared. I have followed the information above and found a folder entitled bookmarkbackups. However, this dates from the re-population of the hard drive and does not find the earlier bookmarks folder. At one time, Firefox stored bookmarks in a .html file. This could be located in a second (backup) drive, but now, the bookmark file is hidden and I have no idea where to find it or how to make a backup. It certainly does not seem to exist as a .html file any longer. It is certainly not obvious where the bookmark data is now stored. It seems that it is imperative to make a backup of ones firefox configuration, but there is no clear mention of this in the Firefox welcome pages. Perhaps this should be flagged up more clearly in the introduction, together with clear information as to how to make the backup and (most importantly) where. It is no use making a backup on the c:/ drive if that drive is trashed by a later re-installation.

You still can make Firefox create an automatic HTML backup (bookmarks.html) in the Firefox profile folder when Firefox is closed by setting browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true on the about:config page.

This HTML backup is created by default in the profile folder as bookmarks.html every time you close Firefox, but you can set the path and file name via the browser.bookmarks.file pref on the about:config page.
The browser.bookmarks.file pref doesn't exist by default and you need to create a new String pref with the name browser.bookmarks.file and set the value to the full path of the backup bookmarks.html file including the file name.

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox

You can check if you have a C:\Windows.old folder with your previous personal data including the Firefox profile folder.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile