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Can someone help me restore a corrupt bookmarks list (i have .html, .json or .sqlite)

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

kazeshi
kazeshi
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My computer died pretty hard on sat. I am attempting to recover my old bookmarks ( i never knew about the firefox feature to store them on an account to access from anywhere -_-).

I am able to restore my places.sqlite, bookmarks.hrml and bookmarks-date.json.

However when i try to restore any of these either nothing happens or it says that they are corrupt/cant load. I was hoping someone on here could tell me how to maybe manually pull the info from here, or figure out how to fix the corrupt files.

My computer died pretty hard on sat. I am attempting to recover my old bookmarks ( i never knew about the firefox feature to store them on an account to access from anywhere -_-). I am able to restore my places.sqlite, bookmarks.hrml and bookmarks-date.json. However when i try to restore any of these either nothing happens or it says that they are corrupt/cant load. I was hoping someone on here could tell me how to maybe manually pull the info from here, or figure out how to fix the corrupt files.

All Replies (2)

John99
John99
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You seem to have figured out most of it,and so maybe the original files are corrupt beyond redemption. I am not sure I can help but will add comments and suggestions nevertheless:

First of all if you have not already done so

  1. make a copy of your profile folder and all the files it contains.
    If you have restore copies of your system you may also have other copies of your profile archived or on a disk image or something, also make copies of those and put them somewhere accessible
  2. Manually save any existing bookmarks, and put them somewhere safe outside firefox paths, maybe on the Windows desktop

When you try to restore bookmarks Firefox overwrites what you have, so if you have repeatedly attempted restoring bookmarks from corrupt files you may no longer have you have anything useful in the current profile. You may have to rely on whatever earlier files or profiles you have.

If you have HTML files they are probably the most user friendly being fairly similar to ordinary text files and many word processors etc may read and edit them so it should be fairly easy to workout what they contain, and if they are repairable or usable. When firefox imports HTML it appends them in the bookmarks library.

The places.sqlite is a more complex database. There are editors available for .sqlite databases, and that includes some that are Firefox extensions.

I am not familiar with editing .json files, they are used as Firefox's default backup files for bookmarks iirc they are basically text based, so presumably it is possible to examine and edit them also. (They will open in text editors, presumably there are editors available, or at least some suitable macros I usually just import them into a new firefox profile to work with them, although that can be very slow if you make a lot of changes to large nested folders of bookmarks)

cor-el
cor-el
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If you copied a corrupted places.sqlite file to the current Firefox profile folder that didn't work then a subsequent restore from a JSON backup may fail as well because of that.

You can try to place a JSON backup that looks good when you open it for inspection in the bookmarkbackups folder of the current Firefox profile and delete all places files in the root profile folder.