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I accidently opened a new profile, now I have lost my bookmarks

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by crankygoat

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I only see one profile listed, so I cannot go back to an old profile. Is there anyway I can recover? Thanks, glinfoot

I only see one profile listed, so I cannot go back to an old profile. Is there anyway I can recover? Thanks, glinfoot

All Replies (3)

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Did you delete the old profile or did you use the refresh feature in Firefox ?

when you use the refresh feature in Firefox then a new profile is created and some personal data (bookmarks and history, form data, tabs) is automatically imported. The current Firefox profile folder will be moved to an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop. Installed extensions and other customizations (toolbars, prefs) that you have made are lost and need to be redone.

It is possible to recover data from the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.


If you didn't use a refresh then you also cannot find the old profile in the default location used for profiles in "AppData\Roaming" then I'm afraid that this data is lost.

It is possible that there has been a problem with the profiles.ini file that registers profiles and that a new default profile got created.

You can check if you have orphaned profiles that aren't registered in profiles.ini and that do not show in the Firefox Profile Manager. You can check that by opening the current profile folder via the about:profiles page and go up one level (..) to see if there are unlisted profiles present. If you have found an orphaned profile then you may want to recover some personal data or restore his profile.

See also "Profile was moved or renamed":

If you want to recover data from an old profile, see:

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I did not intentionally delete a profile, and did not receive a notice asking me if I wanted to delete. This issue came from the last update which automatically took me to a screen and asked me what I wanted to do with my profile. I had 3 choices, one was to create a new profile and that is what I did. I don't remember what the other options were, but something about renaming the profile, the only reasonable choice was create a new one and it never asked me if I wanted to replace the old or delete the old one.

I do have an old Firefox Data folder, but all I see listed are bookmarks from 2016 (that is my greatest loss is getting back these bookmarks) 2016 may be old, but better than nothing. I followed the instructions for "Copying files between profile folders" but I still do not see them in my bookmarks. However when I opened the current profile, I did not know what to choose, so I chose the Root Directory and that is where I pasted. I did not paste it in the bookmarks folder, perhaps I should have?

You mentioned I could have orphaned profiles, however i don't know what you mean by "go up one level, and none of the buttons on that screen seem to take me to anything that would be an option.

Thank you for all your help, it is very much appreciated.

Gae

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"Go up one level" in Windows Explorer, that is, to the directory (folder) which contains all potential profile folders. It is probably called "Firefox", and profile folders have names with random alphanumeric sequences, a dot, and a suffix like "default", or "default-release", unless your profile was user-created and named, in which case the suffix would be [name]. e.g., qw3r7y.default or 4sdf2xcv.glinfoot