Firefox Community Forum

Hiya good citizens of the internet 👋

Please help me recover my bookmarks 🥺

I've gone through every single support article on this topic and tried everything suggested and still no luck. This is my hail mary.

How I got here I needed to do a full wipe and reinstal of my macOS; this was conducted with the help of the Genuis bar. Upon reinstalling Firefox, I signed into my account and my bookmarks are all gone, records of them empty.

I should also note that nothing else ported over. No passwords, no browser extensions. Nada. The passowrds and extensions aren't a big deal. I use a 3rd-party password manager and can easily re-download the handful of extensions/widgets. But I heavily relied on bookmarks for both frequently visited sites and ones rarely-used which I knew were important for future reference. And I cannot remember 80% of them...

What else I've tried other than what's suggested in help article:

• Because I did not check to confirm which Firefox profile I've been signed into for ages and ages before doing the reset, I thought maybe I had just signed into the wrong one. I proceeded to try every other email address I have, including two from my old workplace. None of the other 5 emails had profiles created. I know this because it prompted the sign up userflow; create a password, etc.
• But I also know for a fact that the bookmarks were saved as part of a profile because I used the profile sync feature to auto-port all my bookmarks when I first got this Macbook a year and a bit ago.
• The folders where bookmark backup info is stored locally are empty... Clearly, it wasn't stored in my icloud documents (that's on me for not double-checking)
• I checked my other device (mobile phone) to see if I had firefox downloaded and was signed into the same account as the original, with the bookmarks still visible. Of course I didn't. I only use Safari on my phone 😭

""Grasping at straws: the only other things I can think of""

• Is there some way of linking my MAC address with my IP address and using those to triangulate the correct profile?
• Because my computer got wiped and nothing is saved locally, my only hope is that my bookmarks are floating around the ether. If so, I just need to figure out how to find them.

Any and all help/suggestions are massively appreciated!!

Thanks in advance,

Lauren

I try to synchronize my firefox on my new laptop but it gives 5 minutes to enter the code, the code arrives afer more than 15 minutes.. The help syggests if it not works to use another mail address but I cannot delete the mail adress, every time I want to synchronize the existing mailadress appears with a password field and the adress cannot be changed. Can someone help me to solve this, is there an other way to synchronize?

Full scenario: Computer had some issues, so I set up Windows Backup/Restore to a point just before resetting it, saving that data to an external drive. Then, I reset Windows, choosing the option that lets you keep your files (most of them it looks like) while it reinstalls everything else.

I knew it'd wipe Firefox and I'd need to reinstall it, but when I synced my account, it didn't have logs. The logs are archives of various chats on a website I used to talk to friends. I know those used to be accessible through Firefox's directory under Program Files by checking the data saved for that website (something I had to do once before to remove corrupted logs), but that data obviously wouldn't be there now.

I should've considered this beforehand but I had no idea that data for different websites might not be included in a sync. It does have files for Firefox but I decided not to touch them, since I'd already synced and I didn't know if reverting to that Backup might break Firefox somehow. Or worse, cause me to lose MORE data.

Question now is, what's the chance those might be in that backup I saved? More specifically, data stored about websites I visited.