I lost bookmarks of all my life / Need Help to repair them please
Hello,
I'm a little angry right now because I have lost bookmarks of all my life and I need your help to repair it please? I don't know why but somehow, Firefox which I use for years ; (Thx by the way) ; corrupted my data on the run...? I started Firefox again but, no extension, no bookmarks, etc.. I Have kept a backup of all this FF profile, just in case.
My 1st step was to try to get a new profile a import my previous data from Firefox Sync - but somehow , I'm angry at myself again for not understanding how FF Sync work, no data from FFSync updated my data - It stayed like this for a long time , like a new profile without data (I used Xmarks before so I thought it was replacing it).
2nd step: I tried to load all bookmarks-xxx.jsonlz4 located in the bookmarkbackups folder from the FF bookmarks tools (Import / export ; etc). FF seems to see all the bookmarks but can't load them. What is really important here is that FF backed up files for like a month and even my oldest file is unusable : bookmarks-2019-01-19-xxx.jsonlz4 !!
3rd step: I tried to get my data back from FF files, in bookmarks files like bookmarks-2019-01-19-xxx.jsonlz4 from the bookmarkbackups folder. Someone pointed me to use the https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html website but all the jsonlz4 files in the bookmarkbackups folder seems corrupted (or the format of files changed and his tool may need to be updated ?)
Example : File name: bookmarks-2019-01-19_2392_mKZssqkWMZt+Mqt-HOi68A==.jsonlz4; Size: 283114; last modified 18/01/2019 à 12:38:42 (failed JSON parsing: SyntaxError: Unexpected token in JSON at position 21928) Note: To try a different file, reload this page Can't seem to acces the step 2 part even after waiting longer
4th step: tried to get old Backup of my FF Profiles with Windows 10 Shadow Copy System, "Shadow Explorer" or "System Restore Explorer" Found 3 backup wich I restored also, all bookmarks seems to get the same problem. I think I'll need to look in to this because It's not official Windows tools, but I'm really disapointed here.. I think I'll put them on md5sum tools to compare them for a start.
5th step : tried to repair my <places.sqlite> a (80MB files) which I found renamed to sqlite.corrupt. With the help of http://www.froebe.net/blog/2015/05/27/error-sqlite-database-is-malformed-solved/ , all I can get is a empty database at the end, but Im not a sqlite expert so if anyone has an idea :-)
So please, any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you. (and sorry for my english)
Alle antwoorden (5)
If you aren't able to decompress bookmark backups with a .jsonlz4 file extension then it is likely that the files are corrupted.
It is possible that a corrupted places.sqlite could generate a backup that is corrupted, but normally there should be 15 backups (browser.bookmarks.max_backups) in the bookmarkbackups folder and there should be at least some working.
You can check if you have an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop in case the Refresh feature in Firefox has been used and a new profile has been created.
You can also check if you have a C:\Windows.old folder if you have recently (re)installed Windows 10.
Hi,
I this morning I was looking for an another explanation and I think I found it : I'm victim of this Microsoft bug also:
https://superuser.com/questions/888383/shadow-copy-recovered-files-contain-lots-of-null-blocks
Seems like they didnt patch Win10 because of their new feature called "File History"...
Well, Thank you for your help and sorry to have waisted a lot of your time.
Perhaps you should also ask here https://support.microsoft.com
silou said
3rd step: I tried to get my data back from FF files, in bookmarks files like bookmarks-2019-01-19-xxx.jsonlz4 from the bookmarkbackups folder. Someone pointed me to use the https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html website but all the jsonlz4 files in the bookmarkbackups folder seems corrupted (or the format of files changed and his tool may need to be updated ?)
Example :
File name: bookmarks-2019-01-19_2392_mKZssqkWMZt+Mqt-HOi68A==.jsonlz4; Size: 283114; last modified 18/01/2019 à 12:38:42 (failed JSON parsing: SyntaxError: Unexpected token in JSON at position 21928)
It sounds as though the file was decompressed successfully, or mostly successfully. Could you test whether the URLs can be extracted using more basic (non-JSON-parsing) methods:
(A) Try saving the JSON data to a .txt file (change the file extension to .txt)
(B) Select and copy the following script code:
var txt = document.querySelector('pre').textContent;
var out = 'Extracted Bookmarks\n';
var arrTxt = txt.split('{"guid":');
for (var k=1; k<arrTxt.length; k++) {
if (arrTxt[k].indexOf('"type":"text/x-moz-place"') > -1) {
var strURL = arrTxt[k].split('"uri":"')[1];
strURL = strURL.split('"')[0];
var strTitle = arrTxt[k].split('"title":"')[1] || '[Title Not Available]';
strTitle = strTitle.split('","index"')[0];
out += '\nTitle: ' + strTitle + '\n\nURL: ' + strURL + '\n';
}
}
document.querySelector('pre').textContent = out;
(C) Open the .txt file in a Firefox tab and call up the Web Console in the lower part of the tab using either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Web Developer > Web Console
- (menu bar) Tools > Web Developer > Web Console
- (Windows) Ctrl+Shift+k
(D) Paste the script next to the caret (») and press Enter to run it. The first time you do this, Firefox may ask you to take extra steps to demonstrate you understand it is dangerous to run scripts from strangers.
When the script runs on an intact file, it should generate a text list of title and URL for each bookmark. If there are weird characters in the file, the list may be incomplete or some URLs may contain additional URLs.
What kind of results do you get?