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All bookmarks deleted after Firefox update. Nothing in "Old Firefox Data" folder helped to restore.

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Please help me find and restore my missing bookmarks. There are hundreds of entries needed to access essential sites to pay bills, contact physicians, and much, much more. I am embarrassed to admit that there are also some adult oriented bookmarks that remind this old man about his younger life. Thank you for your understanding and help.

Please help me find and restore my missing bookmarks. There are hundreds of entries needed to access essential sites to pay bills, contact physicians, and much, much more. I am embarrassed to admit that there are also some adult oriented bookmarks that remind this old man about his younger life. Thank you for your understanding and help.

All Replies (6)

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Hi Dr. Williams, before restoring any old backups, could you double-check whether you can see bookmarks in the Library window ("Manage bookmarks" or Ctrl+Shift+O -- O as in Organizer). By default, that window will start off showing bookmarks in the "Other Bookmarks" category. To check the other categories, click them in the left column to show their contents in the right column.

If you see your bookmarks listed here:

If bookmarks are not displaying in the main interface, it could be that you need one or more of these added:

(1) Bookmarks Toolbar: Bookmarks Toolbar - Display your favorite websites at the top of the Firefox window (2) Menu Bar: Restore the Menu bar in Firefox (3) Bookmarks Menu button for the toolbar (): Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars

If you do NOT see your bookmarks in the Library:

You mentioned that you have an Old Firefox Data folder. Was it just created recently? To check its freshness, you can double-click into the folder, then double-click into the weirdly named profile folder, then double-click into the bookmarkbackups folder. The files here should have their creation dates coded into their names. Do you see any January 2022 files?

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Thank you jscher2000 for your response. I have followed your instructions and:

Nothing is in any of the "library" windows except the few items I added today.

  1. I have the Bookmarks Toolbar
  2. I have the Menu Bar
  3. The Bookmarks Menu Button is in the toolbar

The Old Firefox Data folder was created on January 24, 2022. There are 2 folders both created 1/24/2022

     4z4wvbay.default
     ztvhbod5.default-release

In the folders are long lists of entries none of which I understand.

I tried IObit uninstall tool but only got more confused so I am going to delete it unless you tell me not to.

Thank you again for your time.

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Dr. Williams said

The Old Firefox Data folder was created on January 24, 2022. There are 2 folders both created 1/24/2022 4z4wvbay.default ztvhbod5.default-release In the folders are long lists of entries none of which I understand.

In each folder, there should be numerous folders (yellow folder icon), one of which is labeled bookmarkbackups -- that's the one we're looking for.

I tried IObit uninstall tool but only got more confused so I am going to delete it unless you tell me not to.

Danger! Danger! Third party uninstallers may scrub your data and leave you empty-handed. Do not use.

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Yes I have seen those bookmarkbackups in both of the folders. When I open the backup folders both say they are empty. I have also gone to the profile folder and found 2 other profiles but I get the same result in both of them. Thank you.

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This is puzzling.

Do you make any regular disk backups? If so, you could explore whether those backups include any files in the bookmarkbackups folder.

If not, you could check whether you can recover an older file from a restore point. Please DO NOT run Windows' system restore as you probably would lose other data. Instead:

Exploring Restore Points Safely

Set Windows to show hidden files and folders: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14201/windows-show-hidden-files

Then download and run one of these two programs:

Within the most recent restore point shown in the program, you can explore along this path to see whether you can find a shadow copy of your profile:

\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\your-profile

You can export relevant files to a convenient location such as a new folder on your currently live desktop.

Anything there to possibly restore?

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This has gotten way beyond my capabilities. Thank you for your time and effort on my behalf but I think I am going to have to rebuild my bookmark library 1 file at a time. At my age I will likely die before I finish the task. Thanks again for trying to help me.