Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

I lost all my book marks, hitory. it just started up like new! WHY!!!?

  • 9 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

All I know is a pop up came up and said that fire fox is running slow. Click to repair. I did. It froze, so I restarted my pc. and when I opened fire fox it asked me to pick a profile. I read two, both just a bunch of letters and numbers. I picked one and it started up as if it was a new download of fire fox with none of my stuff! What the hell happened? How do I get my old fire fox and stuff back?

All I know is a pop up came up and said that fire fox is running slow. Click to repair. I did. It froze, so I restarted my pc. and when I opened fire fox it asked me to pick a profile. I read two, both just a bunch of letters and numbers. I picked one and it started up as if it was a new download of fire fox with none of my stuff! What the hell happened? How do I get my old fire fox and stuff back?

All Replies (9)

more options

The button you clicked is to run the Refresh feature. That mornally moves your old settings folder to the desktop inside an "Old Firefox Data" folder. Can you find such a folder? If so, please click inside and look for a semi-randomly-named profile folder to see whether it has freshly updated data in it. If so, we may be able to use that to restore your missing settings.

Alternately, you could exit out of Firefox and try that other semi-randomly-named profile that was listed before to see whether that's the one you want. After completely closing Firefox:

Start up in the Profile Manager using the Start menu search box. Type or paste the following and press Enter to run it:

firefox.exe -P

Don't delete anything here!

Any time you want to switch profiles, exit Firefox and return to this dialog.

Select the other profile you didn't try before and start Firefox using that one. Any improvement?

more options

I am not sure what the Start menu search box is. Sorry to be so confused.

more options

I tried to do the restore from two weeks ago. It said it did it. I closed fire fox, then re opened and it did not work.

more options

By the Start menu, I meant the Windows Start menu. It's the one you display by clicking the "orb" at the left end of the task bar. The keyboard shortcut to open it is Ctrl+Esc.

There is a search box at the bottom of the menu. Please make sure to completely close Firefox before trying to start the profile manager, otherwise you just get a new windows with your home page.

I tried to do the restore from two weeks ago. It said it did it. I closed fire fox, then re opened and it did not work.

What kind of restore? Please do not use Windows' system restore right now. In many cases, that causes irreversible data loss.

more options

Ahhh! Thanks! All is good now. Have a good night.

more options

Good news, thanks for reporting back.

If you decide to try a Refresh again -- which probably you won't for a while -- check to make sure you have a good amount of hard disk space available. Sometimes limited space causes it to fail in the middle.

more options

Note that best is to be cautious with doing a Windows System Restore. Using System Restore can cause your Firefox installation to get corrupted because only white-listed files are restored, so always be cautious with using System Restore.

  • You may lose data in the Firefox profile folder like .js and .ini files including profiles.ini
  • You may need to reinstall affected software

Using a System Restore can cause an older version of profiles.ini to get restored and your current profile may no longer be found. In such a case you would have to use the Profile Manager to create a new folder and use "choose folder" to point to the old profile or manually edit profiles.ini and replace the wrong path with the correct profile path.

more options

Naw, I don"t go down that road unless I really have to. I did a right click on a fox fire profile and clicked restore, then it gave me an option to choose two weeks back. Once I did the firefox.exe -P it fixed right up. Again, thanks. We have 4 years of book marks that are important to us that we could not have replaced. I will save your email incase this happens again.

more options

You are talking about restoring an older bookmarks JSON backup?

Note that the name of a JSON bookmarks backup file includes a total item count (folders and separators included) and an hash value to prevent saving the same backup more than once.

  • bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.jsonlz4.