I "refreshed" my firefox and ALL my bookmarks are gone, there is NOTHING in the "Old Firefox Data" folder that it created on my desktop. Please Help!
Yahoo Search kept taking over my tabs. I went into Firefox and stipulated that Google would be my search engine, I ERASED Yahoo from the potential search engines. It still happened. I went into Firefox "help" and while there, it said that I should "Refresh Firefox". It DID NOT SAY YOU WILL LOSE DATA, or BACK UP FIRST, etc. I hit refresh and when Firefox rebooted, ALL my bookmarks were gone. I saw the "Old Firefox Data" folder that it automatically created on my desktop and was greatly relieved, BUT there is NOTHING IN THAT FOLDER!
Please help, I have many, many bookmarks that will be impossible to reassemble.
Thanks in advance,
Terry
All Replies (3)
It's very unusual that your old settings folder is not in the Old Firefox Data folder. It might still be in its original location. Here's a way to check:
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter/Return
In the first table on the page, click the "Show in Finder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders.
Click "up" one level, to the Profiles folder, and see if you have multiple folders here. For example, the older folder might have a name ending with default.
Can you find your older settings folder? If so, a couple of options:
(1) Roll back to the old folder (2) Copy some files from the old folder to the new one (3) Only restore bookmarks
The first one isn't well documented in an article, so if you want to try that, someone will have to type out the steps.
For the second one, this article describes which are the most important files: Recovering important data from an old profile.
For the third one, in the old folder, double-click into bookmarkbackups and copy the most recent file to a convenient location such as the desktop. Then, back in Firefox, use the bookmark restore feature, and when you use Choose File, you'll be able to find the one to restore on the desktop (or whatever convenient location you chose). This article describes the steps for that: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer.
Edit: Removed stray text from copy/paste
Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
By the way, I think your old profile was infected with Spigot or Conduit add-ons. If you end up rolling back, or if the problem returns, you can check the Add-ons page to try to remove those. Either:
- Command+Shift+a
- "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
In the left column, click Extensions. Then, on the right side, disable/remove anything unknown or unwanted.
Often a link will appear above at least one disabled/removed extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.
Did you check if that profile folder is possibly still in its original location?
- /Users/<user>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<profile>/
In Mac OS X v10.7 and later, the ~/Library folder is a hidden folder.
See also: