How To Restore Firefox’s Lost Bookmarks
Did this ever happen to you that you opened Firefox and you found out that all your bookmarks are gone and restarting again again would do no good. Well this sometimes happens when your firefox is not closed properly and mostly due to that you lose all your bookmarks. But many people dont know that Firefox make backup of your bookmarks everyday and there are some simple ways to restore the lost bookmarks in firefox. If this happened with you as well then dont worry because after the following steps, hopefully you will get all your bookmarks back.
The first thing your should do is locate your firefox’s profile folder which is usually in
C:\Documents and Settings\<Windows login/user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
or if your cant find it, simply go to Start > Run and type the following command and it will take you to the firefox profile folder
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
Find this first and then in this folder, there will be a folder of bookmarkbackups as shown in the picture below.
Just Open the BookmarksBackup folder and there you will see many html files with dates given in there name as shown below….
There you go you found all of your bookmarks that were made by firefox automatically. Now Just copy the file you want to. What i mean is copy the latest file by checking the date and paste it somewhere or just paste in your desktop so that it is easy to locate when you want to restore the bookmarks you lost.
Now This is an easy task i-e restoring the backup.
Just Open your Firefox and go to Bookmarks> Organize Bookmarks.
A new window of bookmarks open and then go to File > Import > check From File
30 Comments
Thanks man!
I never knew I even had backups
great post
You saved my life i lost a bunch of really important bookmarks
thanks for this
Doesn’t work with Firefox 3, unfortunately.
I even deleted ALL bookmark files in the profile, and the same set of wrong old, outdated bookmarks kept appearing ????
Then, when the system got so unstable ff wouldn’t open firefox anymore, I had to completely uninstall version 3 and revert to version 2.014 and everything works fine again.
RC1, indeed. You guys at Mozilla taking tips from Microsoft or something ?
This version 3 isn’t even a Beta, let alone a release candidate, imo.
The bookmarks issue is not a secondary minor issue, it’s a major one. No continuity of bookmarks to the new version… ?
Excellent work. Thank you!
You’re welcome, Francis =)
I’ve lost my bookmarks, and they only come back of I reboot the computer.
There is a backup, but when I try and access this I am told that is can’t be opened.
OMG!!! this is GREAT!!! i’ve lost my bookmarks twice before…but not this time…haha, justice!
thank you so much!!
You’re welcome guys
Seriously, thank you so much! I lost my first batch of bookmarks last year and I didn’t know how to restore them. I thought all was lost again but then I found your tutorial. I really appreciate your instructions – they made it easy to restore them.
Clear and accurate step-by-step procedure. Well done. I spent maybe 4-6 hours to save my bookmarks folders. This is a great save. tx! Uri
You’re welcome, Uri
thnx tried 4 different pieces of advice including firefox help? this worked and was well easy to follow!!! happy dayz
Can you take the backups made by Firefox on Windows and import them in a Linux version of FF?
This is awesome! thanks
Won’t work for me
I checked the backup file with a hex editor and it only showed zeros =(
No joy in Mudville. Struck out!
Hammad says: “File > Import > check From File”. Perhaps i’m living in a parallel dimension but my Firefox has no such option. It has only the first two, from IE or from Opera.
I went into Organize Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Restore > Choose File… But that didn’t work either.
I was tired of Opera not improving their widget system so i converted to Firefox. But FireFox is nowhere near as stable as Opera. I’m really sick of reinstalling extensions and losing bookmarks. Any rocket scientists from Mozilla listening????
Even a novice like me understood your instructions. Thankyou!
I’m glad it worked out Shelley.
Haha, I didn’t know there were backup either! Thanks a lot for this simple solution to something that I’m amazed the Firefox folk didn’t even see.. Not as smart as they think are they eh?
Thanks again..
well, it did restored like 50% of my bookmarks, but the other half is… dead… well, thank you anyway.
Great steps, tho I keep getting an “unable to process the back up file” window when I try to import the backup file.
Thank you. just fixed me.
A much better method than this is to use Foxmarks, a firefox add-on.
It’s easier than going through multiple folders and faster too.
Now thats what im talking about. soooooooooo easy. thanks
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Fantastic.
I owe you a pint!!
OMG thank you so much for this article! I’m going to put this in my blog (credit to this site of course). Thanks again!
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