Losing bookmark folders more and more often.
Greetings. I run the latest Firefox on Win7/64 with only three add-ons (Flash Video Downloader, Ghostery, Skype). Of these, only Ghostery really matters to me. If there is any real evidence that any of these is causing my problem (please see below), then I'll be happy to discard it/them and prove you right.
Please forgive my detailing my environment, but I've learned the hard way that I'll be slammed if I don't. The next few paragraphs describe my context. Please bear with me.
My PC is not state-of-the-art but still hums: Dell XPS 8300 heavily modified, i7-2600@3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, Crucial 960GB SSD, WD 3TB Black user data, AMD Radeon R9 200, User Experience 7.6. Yes, I do run Win10, but only under VMware Workstation v12 Pro. Let's not go there. Thank you.
I learned years ago to relocate my Mozilla FF/TB profiles to my user data drive and back them up daily. Yes, I have recreated my FF environment more than once by creating a new FF profile - but always based upon a previous JSON file. Only FF settings and bookmarks matter to me. I can recreate settings in 10 seconds. The only real issue is bookmarks. Perhaps there is a more substantive recovery mechanism that you can suggest? Further, I manually back up bookmarks daily (both JSON and HTML). Yes, I know how to Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > {Backup...,Restore,Import Bookmarks from HTML...,Export Bookmarks to HTML...}. I use these features SEVERAL times per day. The problem, of course, is granularity: these features are "all or nothing". The issue lies below.
Over the years, I've built up over 6,000 bookmarks in ~300 top-level folders with decent distribution across lower-level folders. I have few sub-trees with more than 50 bookmarks in a leaf folder. Yes, I know something about unbalanced tree structures. FWIW, It's clear that I'm beginning to tax the FF bookmark system: about a year ago, despite all apps on SSD, launching FF and rendering the left pane of top-level bookmark folders has gone from virtually instantaneous (< 250ms) to 3-5 seconds. Perhaps a red flag?
On average, I add 25-100 bookmarks daily: mostly (in these trying days of political madness :-) somewhere in a 3-tier tree (politics > 2016 Presidential campaign > {Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, SCOTUS, whatever}... but always a dozen or so in other established folders (health, computing, photography, whatever).
So... FINALLY (don't you hate that adverb in headlines?) to my issue. I'll try to save a bookmark to some (sub-)folder... only to see that it's missing. That (sub-)folder is never the last - even (N-)penultimate - that I might have accessed that day. Today, for example, when finally I've had enough and decided to appeal to you experts, I had saved several DOZEN bookmarks in politics/computing/Tesla/whatever and then tried to save another in "health"... only to discover that it... was. not. there.
I won't try to detail the deficient recovery process that one must undertake in these situations. I guess I would be - grudgingly - willing to search back in my daily JSON/HTML backups to find that last extant instance of "health" (in this case)... but JSON files - as far as I am aware - do not appear to be easily decomposable into (folders and folders of folders of) bookmarks. Of course, I can open the full bookmarks HTML backup file in MS Word... but toward what end? Is there some simple trick - of which I am unaware - whereby I could clip an HTML segment of (folders and folders of folders of) bookmarks and re-insert it into my current Firefox bookmark structure?
So. Here is my hierarchy of needs:
1. FF bookmark manager should just work: not lose (folders of) bookmarks. Well, no doubt, of course, the crowd will slam me that it's all my fault. OK. If so, how? I am willing to learn better how to use Mozilla Firebox bookmarks. But how?
2. Failing that, how can I clip a now-missing bookmark folder (quite likely with a significant bookmark folder tree beneath) from yesterday's JSON/HTML files and re-import it to repair today's data base?
3. Failing that, what are my options? Frankly, I'm now looking at switching browsers, using Evernote/Word/Notepad/bookmarkmanagers to manage bookmarks, etc. Early research suggests greatly reduced reliability and user experience in all of those scenarios.
Thank you for your patience. I am a retired software engineer (but never at the web level) and would be happy to participate in whatever debugging/logging/alternative trial(s) that might resolve this situation. Frankly, I've reached the point where I can no longer trust Firefox!
Best regards,
...milo47
Réiteach roghnaithe
You wrote a long letter. I will try to help you.
Places Maintenance {web link} Allows to run Maintenance tasks on the database that drives Places, the bookmarks and history module behind Firefox.
Open the Add-ons Manager. Locate the add-on and press the Options button. Then follow the directions.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web Link} by holding down the <Shift>
(Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh).
Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-fix-preferences-wont-save
Note: Some software, like Advanced SystemCare with Surfing Protection, can protect files in the Firefox profile folder against changes. If you have such software then check the settings or uninstall this software.
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (6)
Réiteach Roghnaithe
You wrote a long letter. I will try to help you.
Places Maintenance {web link} Allows to run Maintenance tasks on the database that drives Places, the bookmarks and history module behind Firefox.
Open the Add-ons Manager. Locate the add-on and press the Options button. Then follow the directions.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web Link} by holding down the <Shift>
(Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh).
Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-fix-preferences-wont-save
Note: Some software, like Advanced SystemCare with Surfing Protection, can protect files in the Firefox profile folder against changes. If you have such software then check the settings or uninstall this software.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
WOW64; = 32-bit Firefox is only going to use a max of ~3GB of RAM - won't come anywhere near the 16GB you have available. But the other 13GB will help with the background processes and any other programs that are open.
First - are you using Firefox Sync to 'synchronize' your bookmarks across multiple devices? When Sync is used with 'mobile' devices (iOS or Android) bookmarks / folders do get lost, for the last year or so. Per many user reports.
Overall, 6000 bookmarks is a lot. Multiple Profiles with separate sets of bookmarks might be a good idea. I started doing that when I had problems with slowness with the former bookmarks system - bookmarks.HTML - to keep the number of bookmarks per Profile below 2500. The "new" Places system is much better with the number of saved bookmarks, but over 5000 seems to create problems, as many users have reported.
As far as the structure of folder "branches" goes - when you get beyond 3 branches or levels. problems seem to develop and folders may seem to disappear.
HTML bookmarks files are to be imported and will append existing bookmarks that are already in Firefox.
JSON bookmarkbackups files are to be restored and will overwrite any existing bookmarks that are already in Firefox.
So if you want to restore a missing folder of bookmarks, the HTML format is the way to go.
In my experience, as long as the HTML file starts with this header <!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1> a "segment" from an HTML backup should get imported. But will probably end up at the end / bottom of the Bookmarks list in Firefox. No way to control where it will end up or at what "level" the folders will be at.
Bottom line is that Firefox shouldn't be losing be losing bookmarks or folders of bookmarks. "Something" is going on to cause the loss, whether it be Sync, too many levels (or branches) of folders, too many bookmarks overall, or rearranging bookmarks too quickly and Firefox can't keep up with the changes you are making. I keep an eye on the CPU meter in the Task Manager when I am rearranging bookmarks, and wait until it drops from being 'pegged' before doing any more changes. More RAM would help when rearranging bookmarks; meaning using the Win64 build of Firefox.
Thank you both for your help. A couple of observations:
1. I was unaware of Places Maintenance but have now installed and run it all the way through. Here is the first part of its final report:
Database size is 20480 KiB user_version is 30 page_size is 32768 cache_size is -2048 journal_mode is wal synchronous is 1 History can store a maximum of 104858 unique pages Table moz_places has 18278 records Table moz_historyvisits has 0 records Table moz_inputhistory has 0 records Table moz_hosts has 6352 records Table moz_bookmarks has 23485 records Table moz_bookmarks_roots has 5 records Table moz_keywords has 0 records Table sqlite_sequence has 1 records Table moz_favicons has 1325/1330 records ********** Table moz_anno_attributes has 9 records Table moz_annos has 6039 records Table moz_items_annos has 3266 records Table sqlite_stat1 has 11 records
Note 23,485 "moz_bookmarks". I starred "moz_favicons" because it dropped from 1330 to 1325 after maintenance.
2. Could I really have 23K bookmarks? Well, I exported them to HTML, opened that file in Firefox, copied that text into Word, and ran Word Count... which reports 24,862 paragraphs. That includes blank lines and folder titles as well, but 23K bookmarks do seem likely, eh?
3. I use Firefox for two utterly different purposes, so I split the bookmarks into two profiles: one with 4,028 "moz_bookmarks", the other with 19,104. These report 4,273 and 20,593 paragraphs in Word, so it appears that I now have 4K and 19K bookmarks. Subdividing either profile further is... not obvious.
4. So, my new strategy will be to run Places Maintenance regularly - in particular, before exporting JSON/HTML versions of the bookmark sets. Perhaps this will help.
5. No, I gave up on Firefox Sync shortly after trying it: just too many problems - although no worse than iPhone/Safari/IE bookmark "integration". Now I just keep key bookmarks (about 70) in an HTML file in Dropbox always open on my iPhone. Works for me.
Thank you both again. I'll report back in a few days with my results.
...milo47
Indeed. It convinced me that I should not rely on FF bookmarks. I have been using Evernote for many of my research links with specific info, putting them into the apropriate notebooks. I think that I will do the same for my general "source" links as well. using FF only for those bookmarks whose loss won't cause pain. Thanks for putting me onto this. I'm not nearly as tech-savvy as you are and I think I'll just jump ahead to the ending.
Hello again. I'm the OP, finally back nearly three months later to report that Places Maintenance seems to have resolved this issue. I run it daily just before saving bookmarks both as JSON and HTML. My two FF profiles currently house 20K and 5K bookmarks... and *nothing* has been lost since embarking upon the Places Maintenance protocol!
So... thank you, FredMcD, thank you so very much for suggesting this strategy.
Would it be too cheeky to suggest that the core of PM be incorporated into FF itself somehow?
Anyway, unless this issue bites me again, it's closed. As always, thank you for what you all do for the rest of us!
...Milo47
Glad to help. Safe Surfing.
These can't get your data back, but will help in the future.
These add-ons can be a great help by backing up and restoring Firefox
FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) {web link} FEBE allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions, history, passwords, and more. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up -- It will actually rebuild your saved files individually into installable .xpi files. It will also make backups of files that you choose.
OPIE {web link} Import/Export extension preferences