How to save History (as displayed in Library window)

Hi,

Firefox saves all your data in your profile folder. I suggest backing up the whole folder as described in Manually back up and restore Firefox profile data.

Please note that the data should be preserved on reinstall, unless you delete it manually. Refreshing Firefox also saves your data into a separate folder on your desktop, but recovering it may bring back the problems you are trying to solve (if any).

That said, backing up the profile folder to a safe location is the most reliable choice.

Thanks, Denys, for the prompt and thorough reply. I see I did a poor job of asking my question.

I am having a problem--described elsewhere--and would like to extract and set aside the profile's record of the URLs currently open in the tabs of the open windows: in case I need to start with a clean profile.

I mentioned History only in case there is no easy way to capture just the open URLs in text format. In that case, it might be much easier to capture the History URL's. Then, at least, I could scan through them and rescue some.

joaquin.oakland, you could always bookmark all open tabs into a folder (on Windows press ctrl+shift+D), then after restoring bookmarks in the new profile, find the folder and select the 'open all' option from its right-click context menu.

joaquin.oakland, your session file is also stored in the profile folder (under sessionstore.jsonlz4). You'll be able to restore your session from it.

Thanks, much, TechHorse. I found that procedure exported only the bookmarks in the currently active Firefox window. It's good to know how to do that.

The rest of this post is about what followed.

But: There may be a Firefox design choice that limits the function of the bookmarks export capability. I discuss that here below, but I do not want to pursue it. I will restate my problem in my next post in this thread, to be more clear about what I want to do.

For anyone interested, the underlying Firefox problem I am trying to recover from is at:

    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1584559

I do not wish to discuss that larger problem here.

For my experience using Manage Bookmarks:

With a DuckDuckGo search, I found:

 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/export-firefox-bookmarks-to-backup-or-transfer

Following those instructions exported all Bookmarks filed under Bookmarks Toolbar. (I don't know what was selected in the left pane of the Library window when I did that.) Wanting all Bookmarks, I repeated that, Selecting Bookmarks Menu on the left. That exported all Bookmarks filed in the Bookmarks Toolbar; not those in Bookmarks Menu. So I repeated again, selecting All Bookmarks on the left. Again, exported Toolbar; no others.

I've been using Firefox as my sole browser for about twenty-five years, but have been pretty simple-minded about the many features. So I have no idea why there are bookmarks stored under both Toolbar and Menu. But I am not concerned to know the reason.

I use Firefox with a single pane window and the toolbar; no panes but the current displayed URL (don't even know if there can be panes in the browser window. So, in the Library window, I copied everything under Bookmarks Menu into a folder under Bookmarks Toolbar.

Then exported again, opened that .html with BBEdit, saved it as .pdf, opened that with Acrobat, saved that as .xlsx, in case I wanted to later manage the huge collection of bookmarks. Meanwhile I can import to a clean Firefox, as a later step in trying to recover from the problem at ...//en-US/questions/1584559.

For the present I'll more carefully state my current effort in the following post.

Here is a (somewhat?) better statement of what I want to do.

I have a number of Firefox windows open. Firefox is displaying only the two I created this morning. The other open windows show in the list under Menu>Window. Selecting one of those others has no visible effect. <That is: The front window is still the one I used to select from the list. The window I selected was not displayed before I selected it and it is not displayed after I select it.>

I can't find any way to display one of those other windows.

   I want to save the URLs of all my open tabs. 
   Tabs in the displayed windows and tabs in the windows that Firefox shows in the menu, but I can't get Firefox to display.

I want to save those URLs, so I can recover them for use in a fresh install of Firefox.

So I see two ways to proceed. I'll phrase these as questions.

1. How can I export or otherwise save the URLs of the open tabs in the open windows that Firefox won't display?

2. How can I extract from the open profile (located in my filesystem storage) the URLs of the open tabs in the open windows that Firefox won't display. (Or some data that I can massage into URLs.)

(One way to rewrite 2 might be: Where can I find in the active profile the URLs of the tabs that are open in the Firefox windows that are open? Or some data I can massage into those URLs.)

Thanks in advance to all.