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Tried to edit backup bookmarks html document in Notepad. Saved as html but now lost formatting & links - help!

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  • Last reply by John99

bigglesthecat
bigglesthecat
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We've had malware problems so I backed up my hard drive's bookmarks onto our server but now the bookmarks are out of date. I just wanted to update them and save them back as the full web page that I originally had as the backup, so I can import them into the new PC we are about to purchase. Now I think I've ruined the whole thing by opening it in Notepad, editing one of the tags and then saving as an html file. It opens in Firefox but there are no spaces or paragraphs or hyperlinks -- it's now just a mass of text squashed together. I can't find anything about this on the Firefox Help section. What am I doing wrong? I didn't change any of the formatting or coding!

We've had malware problems so I backed up my hard drive's bookmarks onto our server but now the bookmarks are out of date. I just wanted to update them and save them back as the full web page that I originally had as the backup, so I can import them into the new PC we are about to purchase. Now I think I've ruined the whole thing by opening it in Notepad, editing one of the tags and then saving as an html file. It opens in Firefox but there are no spaces or paragraphs or hyperlinks -- it's now just a mass of text squashed together. I can't find anything about this on the Firefox Help section. What am I doing wrong? I didn't change any of the formatting or coding!

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John99
John99
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What you could have done is (these options may still be open to you depending on the state of your sytems).

Firefox keeps bookmarks, along with History in a database called places.squlite additionally

  • it makes some automated bookmarks backups,
  • and also give you an option to manually make backups
  • and has a sync facility allowing backup to another device
    see How do I set up Sync on my computer?

Note if you are trying to combine bookmarks from an older profile and a small set of recent bookmarks (Remembering to always backup bookmarks manually first of all)

  1. export the new small set as HTML (important to use HTML option not the default .json)
  2. import the old bookmarks (or even just overwrite the new places.sqlite with the original manually, which is what importing achieves)
  3. import the HTML using the bookmarks library, and Firefox will append them to the end of the existing bookmarks.

See also Importing Bookmarks & Favorites