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

lost bookmarks -- cannot restore from backup

Mozilla crashed and did some weird restore. Now all my backups are gone. Tried to manually restore from backup, says "unable to process the backup file" --- tried this with several dates. please advise, i need these back!

Mozilla crashed and did some weird restore. Now all my backups are gone. Tried to manually restore from backup, says "unable to process the backup file" --- tried this with several dates. please advise, i need these back!

All Replies (3)

Have you tried using all of the backup files?

Look on your desktop. Do you see a folder called; Old Firefox? Look inside. Look for the folder with the latest creation date.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_process_the_backup_file_-_Firefox

jscher2000 has a tool on his website to extract out your bookmarks and save them to an HTML-format bookmark export file. If you want to try it, here is the page:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/bookbackreader.html

To open the bookmarkbackups folder in Finder, use the "Open in Finder" button in the first table on the Troubleshooting Information page, and double-click into bookmarkbackups where you should see several dated files. From there you can drag and drop onto the conversion tool.

To import the HTML file, see the steps in this article: Import Bookmarks from an HTML file.

First, try shutting down and restarting Windows to free up file locks and complete any pending updates, just in case that is the reason for the problem.

If your Firefox also won't add new bookmarks or accumulate new history, it could be the problem discussed in this article:

Fix "The bookmarks and history system will not be functional" error message