Before I do this, should I have done something that makes you think that the number of bookmarks should have reduced.

My hope was that Verify Integrity could clean up any weird recursion issue. That was all.

Ive seen full folders duplicated, altho not sure if this applies to every duplicate...I am looking at one folder with 30 of the same name in.

Ok re verifying integrity, I thought it was only a report, rather than the results of an action...The extension I found, doesnt seem to have an automatic duplicate delete, so it will take me ages to manually delete all the possible duplicates....unless anyone knows different...or another extension thats better.

Ive found another app called Bookmark Dupes, which says I have 169k bookmarks of which 167k are duplicates....I will try that one, as it appears it can seperate the files with the press of a button....

Ok re verifying integrity, I thought it was only a report, rather than the results of an action.

One of its functions is to check for and try to fix certain corruption problems.

Ive found another app called Bookmark Dupes, which says I have 169k bookmarks of which 167k are duplicates....I will try that one, as it appears it can seperate the files with the press of a button....

Hopefully that works.

Well, what a day Ive had......first of all, the first app only had manual delete, and on a possible 200 000 duplicates, it would take forever, so i didnt bother with that...

The second app was more powerful, it warned about going into expert mode, so I didnt. I didnt (it seems) read the info about it either...where it said you can copy your duplicates to a Dupes folder,I thought they were recoverable...well apparently not and after noticing how many of my bookmarks it had removed, I thought I might as well just give up and create new ones...However, I thought I would have one last go and trying to restore from a backup or import the html file i created....I did so many back ups and created so many HTML files that it was a long process. I tried restoring from the 12 suggested files and a couple more and got nothing...I then found 3 HTML files on my desktop and one of them showed a bit of promise. It DID put something back in my bookmarks folder but it didnt look like bookmarks. It was a repetitive list of bookmark toolbar, tabs, recent tabs, bookmarks, other bookmarks and a couple more non specific bookmark related folders... However, I managed to dig further and found that my whole bookmarks toolbar items were in fact in tact and I was able to cut and paste them back onto my toolbar...I had to search over 90 duplicate bookmark toolbar folders to get the right one...I am extremely pleased that Ive got my bookmarks back in place, but really, I am worse off than when I started, as now i fear I have MORE duplicates...so...back to the drawing board. I'm going to attempt to manually delete all the remaining folders showing in the "all bookmarks" list.

Hi Bob, do you still have the .json backup and .html export you made before running Verify Integrity? Not that you want to look at them right now...

Hi...Ive still got a couple of each I renamed, but not sure when they are off....I did delete a couple more.

Well, I finally managed to delete ALL the duplicate bookmark files and folders....

To show the amount of bookmarks I accumulated during this process, I checked the size of my previously saved bookmarks.json files and my bookmarks.html files that I had saved from different days while working on this.............. At the time I started this process my .json file was 50,144 kb, after using one of the apps it went up to 100,396kb....2 days ago when I finished manually deleting the duplicates the size of this file was a mere 764kb. NO wonder my "search" was hampered........... At roughly the same times I created the .html files....at the start this file was 172,531kb, later on it more than doubled to 345,790kb, and after my manual delating it dropped to 6,458kb...

My search now is instant, and theres no freezing or lag......which was my main problem that prompted this "ask for help" post...

Unfortunately I didnt manage to get an answer on here that solved the problem, or any indication why it happened in the first place, but I will now keep an eye on my bookmarks.json and bookmarks.html for any disproportional increases, so that it doesn't happen again...

I'd like to thank the contributors to this thread, as I did learn a couple of new things from their posts, even though it didn't solve the problem.

I will close the thread now as "Problem Solved"