Recover Firefox Book Marks - The Easiest Way
Currently experiencing one of those dreadful moments, power failures coupled with heavy rains. Well it definitely is romance time for all couples ;), but stags like me, just hate it.
It just got worse, a client waiting for updates from my end, while I am busy working on it. I had some quick bookmarks open for reference. Yes, I use Mozilla Fireforx and I love it for reasons kown. Though it’s not the “Perfect” broswer, I can bet that it’s the best one and can beat any other free browsers currently available in the market.
Recently I updated to 2.0.0.5 . and the first thing I noticed is that an old bug has creeped back, which seemed to have been resolved in 2.0.0.4 . The bug is, if the Firefox shuts down unexpectedly, all your bookmarks are lost, yeah literally you won’t find them (unless you know how to get them back 
). This was fixed in 2.0.0.4, as my Firefox did shut down unexpectedly a couple of times, but when I restarted it, I would find all the bookmarks intact.
Today, for the first time after upgrading to 2.0.0.5, my Firefox shut down unexpectedly (thanks to the power failure), and a UPS in repair, which needs to be worked on by a technician.
After what seemed like eternity, the power finally came back and I turned on the Firefox application only to find all my book marks were gone again. I just could not afford to loose them as there was a lot of information which were on “must read” now list. I had to find a way to get them back.
I just searched for “Recover bookmarks on Firefox” and swoosshh … I got the solution. Well little did I know it was so easy to recover the bookmarks ?
Here’s the procedure how to recover your lost bookmarks in Firefox the easiest way. I’m currently using XP, so will explain with respect to XP, for other OS’s have a look here.
**Ensure that Firefox application is not running while doing this. **
1> Click on Start –> Run –> %APPDATA% and click OK
2> Navigate to the folder Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles\\xxxxxxxx.default
3> If it’s only you who uses the Firefox and there is only one user on the comp, then you’ll find the default-user folder in Profiles folder, else you’ll find a folder with respective log on username.
4> In here you’ll find “bookmarkbackups” folder. Firefox automatically saves up to 5 latest bookmarks in the “bookmarkbackups” folder. The bookmarks are stored in “bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD-html” format.
5> Go back to Profiles\<username> folder, delete bookmarks.html, get the latest bookmark from “bookmarkbackups“, rename the file as “bookmarks.html”
6> Restart Firefox and your bookmarks should be back in order
Ah! good nice find there. However, I prefer using Del.Icio.us bookmarks plugin. That allows me to keep my bookmarks in a central place and so, I don’t have to worry about losing them, secondly, If I go somewhere else, I get to access them without worrying that my computer is not with me.
Comment by ReviewSaurus — July 22, 2007 @ 9:28 am
Del.icio.us and other similar Social Bookmarking sites are amazing
.. But these links were those quick read/reference ones, which support me when I’m looking for a particular solution, more like will be useless later on.
Your mention of del.icio.us has given some food for thought for one of the coming posts
~G
Comment by admin — July 22, 2007 @ 9:40 am
Hi there,
Firefox is not doubt the best web browser and is going to remain so.
I prefer Social sites over bookmarks but yes as you said sometimes the links are just for quick reference but i never faced such problems, but if ever i’ll face it… i’ll now have a solution.
Thanks for sharing it.
A very Nice blog.
Comment by Sunil Parmar — July 22, 2007 @ 12:31 pm
Thanks for dropping by Sunil. However I plan to write a small extension which automatically saves the bookmarks in case the firefox crashes unexpectedly.
Don’t think there is one like that out there, may be time for one of us to go ahead and get one.
You too have a great blog, so will drop in often.. :).
~Gautam
Comment by admin — July 22, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
Awesome man…Thanks alot…….u really helped me alot on this issue..
Comment by Ahmer — December 12, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
@Ahmer : Welcome
.. if you have any other issues, do drop a message :).
Comment by admin — December 12, 2007 @ 4:35 pm