Lost all my bookmarks after my IT dept messed with my computer.
I came in this morning and my computer was acting up. My I.T. dept. staff spent about 1 hour messing with my computer, and when I got back on my machine, Mozilla Firefox was missing. They came back and restored Mozilla, but they lost my bookmarks and replaced them with really old bookmarks from IE. I don't use IE except when it's mandatory for certain programs, so those bookmarks are extremely out of date.
How can I get my bookmarks back? I've tried all the fixes I can find online, but I cannot find an archived date prior to today. Am I missing something somewhere?
Chosen solution
I searched Windows Explorer for all files with the word Bookmarks in them. I found my last automated backup from Friday, and was able to restore my old bookmarks. Biggest problem with trying to find them with instructions found on the Internet was that my I.T. department has disabled being able to find files in AppData. When I found the backup from Friday, I copied it to my Desktop and was able to Restore it from my Desktop.
I found a work-around that my I.T. team has setup to keep staff from correcting their own problems.
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If they did a "full" uninstall including removing your personal data, then it might not be possible to recover your bookmarks...
But let's check a few places first before laying into IT.
- Do you see anything like an "Old Firefox Data" folder on your desktop? If so, is there anything recently updated inside?
- Do you see anything like an "Old Firefox Data" folder in your Recycle Bin that you could undelete and then look inside?
- If you open the following folder, do you see any extra profile folders (one is the mostly blank one you're using now, so we're hoping to find a second or third one)?
- Type or paste
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
into the Start menu search box and press Enter
- Type or paste
In re-reading your original question, what were the "archived versions" you were looking for? Sometimes older versions of your Firefox data files can be recovered from a system restore point, but you may need an extra tool for that.
There IS an Old Firefox Data file, but the only file in it is the one they established today, from the IE bookmarks. They told me that my overall problem was that "my profile was corrupted", and therefore those preferences were lost. I'm not buying it, because when I left the office on Friday, everything was running fine.
They also emptied my Recycle Bin.
Usually the Old Firefox Data folder is created by using the Refresh feature and contains the old settings folder from the time of the Refresh. If the Refresh was done BEFORE your old profile got removed, then there should be older files in the bookmarkbackups subfolder. If it was done AFTER, then it's useless, unfortunately.
The program I was thinking of before is called System Restore Explorer. I don't know whether it is considered safe/appropriate for your environment, but what it does is let you look in Windows restore points for files you want to recover and pull those out individually without having to actually run a complete restore (which you seldom want to do). You are familiar with where the profile folders are (C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming) so you could look for old bookmark backups in there. Or maybe your IT has an alternate tool they support...
Chosen Solution
I searched Windows Explorer for all files with the word Bookmarks in them. I found my last automated backup from Friday, and was able to restore my old bookmarks. Biggest problem with trying to find them with instructions found on the Internet was that my I.T. department has disabled being able to find files in AppData. When I found the backup from Friday, I copied it to my Desktop and was able to Restore it from my Desktop.
I found a work-around that my I.T. team has setup to keep staff from correcting their own problems.