I-Firefox Community Forum

I have recently purchased a new Windows 11 computer, and want to install Firefox there and transfer all my bookmarks, passwords, etc. There are obviously quite a few Support articles on this topic, and seemingly quite a few methods to use: copy and paste profile folder, sync, the backup/restore function within Settings, etc. I'm a bit reluctant to use sync, as some users report it can be an incomplete transfer. My current profile also may contain some "corruption", so I'm reluctant to copy the entire profile folder to the new computer.

Comments by esteemed and superb contributor cor-el in this Support article: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/que.../1454070] therefore may be my best option. He wrote:

Note that best is to avoid restoring a full profile folder and only restore important files that are safe to restore/transfer.

   bookmarks and history: places.sqlite
   favicons: favicons.sqlite
   bookmark backups: compressed .jsonlz4 JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder
   cookies.sqlite for the Cookies
   formhistory.sqlite for saved autocomplete Form Data
   logins.json (encrypted logins) and key4.db (encryption key/primary password) for logins saved in the Password Manager
   cert9.db for certificates stored in the Certificate Manager
   persdict.dat for words added to the spell checker dictionary
   permissions.sqlite for Permissions and possibly content-prefs.sqlite for other website specific data (Site Preferences)
   sessionstore.jsonlz4 for open tabs and pinned tabs (see also the sessionstore-backups folder) 

My questions are: 1. Why is it "best is to avoid restoring a full profile folder"? 2. Is this the complete list of "important files that are safe to restore/transfer"? 2. In my profile folder, there are several files that start with the same file name, but then have different file extensions. For example: cookies.sqlite, cookies.sqlite.bak, cookies.sqlite-shm, cookies.sqlite-wal. Should I restore ALL these files, or just "cookies.sqlite"? 3. Is the correct procedure to copy the selected files from the "old" profile, and then paste them to the "new" profile, which presumably would overwrite files of the same name in the "new" profile? Thanks!

(Apologies for any formatting, bold text, and italicized test oddities. I selected these options for parts of this text, but am not sure I did that correctly. It would be very helpful if a question/message could be previewed prior to sending!)

FireFox browser closed and when I opened it all my bookmarks are gone, all of my history is gone everything is gone as though I never ever used firefox in my life.

Hi, I'm Albert.

I had like 10,000 open tabs (not exaggerating) and these tabs are gone after a blue screen error and a few Windows updates. I want to restore those tabs, but I can not because the "Restore the previous session" option is grayed out.

Are there ways to restore these open tabs?

If there isn't one, then I want to restore all the websites I have visited over the past few years and manually filter them.

How do I do it?

The Firefox library contains history but the oldest history it contains is 2024 December one. I guess the dedicated folder removed my old browsing history as it was filled up?

What I read is that places.sqlite file contains all the browsing history. Is this right? My places.sqlite file size is 80.0 MB (83,886,080 bytes). Is there a size limit on this file? I wonder if this file contains all my browsing history.

I have my places.sqlite file and DB Browser installed on my computer. But I don't know what to do next after opening places.sqlite file.

If there are better suited applications for my purpose than DB Browser, please recommend me one with a little instruction.

Long story short, how do I restore my open tabs or browsing history?

Please help me.

Mozilla usually doesn’t restore all the windows I’m working in; when I open it, it only restores a few of them. I usually use the ‘History’ > ‘Recently Closed’ > ‘Reopen All Windows’ option, but this time not all the windows I need are being restored. My most important window, containing 1,000 essential tabs for various articles, hasn’t been restored, and it seems as though I have absolutely no chance of finding it at all; I don’t even have a ‘Restore previous sessions’ button. I don’t know how to get that window back, because restoring the tabs one by one would take an age and I’d probably lose a lot of them (it’s very important that these were tabs, not bookmarks). What should I do?

All my bookmarks disappeared and the bookmark button does not work. I have refreshed Firefox - no change. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox but still no restoration of Bookmark button functionality. OS Win10

Hello and good afternoon. I have a problem with my last session as it doesn't appear, even when I try to do it manually in Settings-History-Import and backup-Restore, it shows me some options of different dates with all my last browser history, but none of them works, it simply doesn't open any of the web pages. I don't have any other profile, and I already tried the troubleshooting too I Hope you can help me. Thanks in advance

My computer ran into an error and restarted and I lost my entire browsing history, bookmarks, extensions, etc. Now I have nothing saved and the only browsing history my computer is showing is when I briefly opened microsoft edge. I regularly used duckduckgo, so most of my data is gone. Is there anything that can be done or is it just gone.

I read the existing articles and followed them, starting with "manage bookmarks". When I click on restore, there is a list of the last 15 backups by date. EVERY one of them results in an error message "unable to process the file".

Manually searching for bookmarks.html or json, resulted in nothing found at first. Then I discovered the path to the bookmarks folder were all hidden folders (after the 'user' folder). I got them to display in file explorer ('show hidden files' selected) and tried to manually select the JSON files that way, to restore bookmarks. That also did not work, resulting in the same message depicted below.

Please help

My bookmarks have stopped working. When I went to Edit Bookmark I found they are all empty. I can create a new bookmark as usual, but I have over 300 bookmarks that no long function that are very important to my work. Is there any way I can possibly restore them, as my work depends on them?

Last night I had an operating system update. Before the OS update, I closed all open apps, including Firefox. In the past, the session I closed the previous evening was restored. But this morning, all my pinned tabs and other open tabs are gone, and Restore Previous Session does not appear as an option on the dropdown menu. Recently Closed Tabs is pretty random, not really helpful. Recently Closed Windows only shows one tab that I opened this morning (probably a mistake on my part). Is there any way for me to retrieve the session from yesterday?

hello,

I want to transfer my profile from an old laptop to a new one. i am not comfortable with uploading my passwords to the cloud as i do not understand how this is safe. i made tar.gz file with the entire profile, almost 1gb and put that on the new laptop. edited the profiles.ini and install.ini and expected the profile will load, but firefox simply does not work in that profile. it cannot browse and clicking the menu button in top right does nothing. Please, help. If I share data below that is the working profile, not the one that fails.

I deleted a profile not knowing it would delete everything I had. How can I undo it? I didn't want Firefox Profiles, it was forced. I deleted it, and everything just got deleted. Can someone please help revert this? Thanks.

I am helping a friend who has a problem when opening any browser software on an old laptop so I cannot operate the syncing option. The old laptop uses Windows 10.

I want to transfer (to new laptop running Windows 11) the history, bookmarks and passswords by copying from users/hername/AppData/ but do not know which files need to be copied

When I tried to log in to my account earlier today, I found that it was gone. I used my recovery key to create a new password and now lost all data, passwords etc. What do I do now? Why did this happen? I am not very computer literate but have tried all of the suggestions in your help forum and nothing works. Nothing has changed on my computer since my last login yesterday. Firefox is my home page and browser.