While I have never had this happen to me personally, I know several folks who have started up their Firefox to discover all or some of their bookmarks are gone. If this happens to you…Don’t panic! All is not lost! A cool feature with Firefox is it keeps a back-up of your bookmarks for the past five days. Recovering your bookmarks is very easy:
- From the Bookmarks Menu select Manage Bookmarks… (Fx 1.5) or Organize Bookmarks… (Fx 2.0 & 3.0).
- This opens the Bookmarks Manager window. From the File menu and select ‘Import” (Fx 2.0) or Click Import and Backup (Fx 3.0), select Import.
- Click the button for From File and click Next>
- You will need to navigate to your Profile Folder. From there you will see a sub folder called bookmarkbackups, navigate to this folder.
- Select any of the five bookmarks-XXXX-XX-XX.html files in the folder. Tip: normally you should select the most recent back-up, however if the file size of that back-up is much smaller than the others, select a larger sized back-up. Click Open.
- Firefox will rebuild your bookmark list and you will see all your bookmarks listed in the Bookmarks Manager Window. Close the Bookmarks Manager Window.
Keep in mind, if you have added any bookmarks since the point you had lost your bookmarks, you may end up with duplicates. To remove, simply right-click on the duplicate bookmark and select delete.
Great tip - I’ve lost my bookmarks twice when they simply disappeared from Firefox, and a third time with a HDD failure. I’m using the Foxmarks plugin to back up online, but this will be handy too.
You just saved me from having a heart attack after updating to Firefox 2.0.0.9. It doesn’t seem to recover bookmarks from the “Bookmarks Toolbar” though, which is still a bit frustrating. I linked to you here: http://www.jakebouma.com/2007/11/07/firefox-2009-missing-bookmarks/
I followed the advice here, and deleted a few other files that had been corrupted when I updated from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, and everything is working smoothly now.