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Why does Firefox back up my bookmarks as a .json file, but it can't restore .json files?

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I downloaded my activity from Google/Youtube and all my LIKED files are in a .json file. I thought that I could use Firefox to import/restore the file as bookmarks, but it's not working. I backed up my current bookmarks and noticed that it created a .json file. It was able to restore/import that file. Why can't I restore the .json file from my Google activity that I downloaded, all the LIKED videos? Is there a way to convert the .json file into an HTML file so I can import it that way? Seems to me that Firefox is keeping bookmarks as a .jsonlz4 file. Is there a way to convert the .json file to that?

I downloaded my activity from Google/Youtube and all my LIKED files are in a .json file. I thought that I could use Firefox to import/restore the file as bookmarks, but it's not working. I backed up my current bookmarks and noticed that it created a .json file. It was able to restore/import that file. Why can't I restore the .json file from my Google activity that I downloaded, all the LIKED videos? Is there a way to convert the .json file into an HTML file so I can import it that way? Seems to me that Firefox is keeping bookmarks as a .jsonlz4 file. Is there a way to convert the .json file to that?

Endret av markfleener

All Replies (6)

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Hi markfleener, a .json file from one source is likely to have a different format from a .json file from another source. They are most definitely not going to be interchangeable. Also, beware, Firefox's Restore feature for bookmarks totally replaces whatever you currently have, so that's not the best move in this case.

If you open the Google/YouTube file in a Firefox tab, after a few moments delay, Firefox should display a structured view of the data. What I think you will need is a converter that reads this particular format and generates an importable HTML-format bookmarks file. Maybe someone has posted one somewhere??

If we're starting from scratch: Where did you get your activity? Maybe I could try it (I'm not very active, though, so I might have to go like a few things...).

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Go to google.com,

Go to the upper right hand corner to click on your icon/profile,

Click on PRIVACY,

Click on EXPORTING & DELETING YOUR INFORMATION,

Click on MY ACTIVITY,

Go to the upper right hand corner 4 icons over to the left there's 3 dots stacked on top themselves, click on that,

Click on OTHER GOOGLE ACTIVITY,

Click on DOWNLOAD YOUR DATA,

Click on SELECT NONE,

Scroll down to the bottom and turn on YouTube,

Click on NEXT,

Click on CREATE ARCHIVE,

Then download it,

Extract the zip file, etc.

THAT'S WHERE I GOT THE JSON FILE FOR THE VIDEOS I'VE LIKED.

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Would you know how to use this converter? I don't know what to put down for the URL...

http://convertjson.com/json-to-html-table.htm

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Actually, I just got it to convert without putting anything down as a URL, but it doesn't really look like anything useful.

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Thanks, I think for future reference this is a good starting point for exporting:

https://takeout.google.com/

I liked some videos and grabbed an example, so I'll look at extracting data for bookmarks:

I don't know whether any of the other fields are useful/important at this point.

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