Avatar for Username

Buscar en Ayuda

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Este tema ha sido archivado. Haz una nueva pregunta si necesitas ayuda.

Can I locate bookmarks after Windows re-installation?

  • 2 respuestas
  • 1 tiene este problema
  • 2 visitas
  • Última respuesta de cor-el

user1309299
user1309299
more options

I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

Todas las respuestas (2)

augibson
augibson
more options

ryley2637 said

I have a computer that had Windows completely re-installed and they didn't make a backup of the Firefox bookmarks before wiping the HDD. They had no backup .html files; had FireFox Sync set up or anything else that would normally backup the bookmarks. I thought about trying to use file recovery software to see if I can locate any of the old profile files that might still be on the HDD. Would this have a chance of being successful, and if so what files/folders should I look for that would have the bookmarks?

If they wiped the HDD, then even file recovery won't do any good to retrieving your bookmarks.

Best regards, Austin

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Firefox creates only compressed .jsonlz4 backups and being compressed they only contain unknown binary data, so it won't be possible to do a low level search for this data in the case these clusters haven't been reused. A normal reformat wouldn't initialize all bytes to a know value as this would take a very long time to complete with current hard drive sizes, but merely re-initializes the file system data structure.