lost all my firefox bookmarks :(

My Avast virus scanner hasnt been playing nice with Firefox recently. It kept changing my default search provider from Google but that wasnt a big deal.

A few days ago it said I have problems with 3 extensions (not all FF i think). I removed the first 2 without incident. When I removed the third one the FF browser closed and when I reopened it it was a fresh install. It had the welcome messages of a new browser, all forms, bookmarks, history were gone.

Is there some way to restore some/all of my bookmarks? I've done a search in my computer and dont see any backups I made. I'm hoping there's some kinda auto bookmarking? I did find something with a .json extension, and I notice if I try to make a backup now via FF the extension on that is json, so that's something. But this file is only 2.35 kb, so that doesnt help.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!
Dan

Hello BigDan,

This article on the Firefox website might be useful: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/...sing-bookmarks

You mentioned Avast picked-up and removed browser extensions, Can you please run a scan with http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Malwarebytes will product a log, please can you upload it to here? Navigate to: C:\ProgramData\Malwarebytes\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\Logs and upload the logs to here, which have todays date.

Thank you,
VinnyBuxton

It is quite possible that your original Firefox profile, which contains, among other things, bookmarks, is still on your computer; however, even if it is, it may be corrupt, so that you might want to transfer, one at a time, the files in the original profile to the new one, and test before proceeding.

Here is the information about Firefox profiles:

Profile folder - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Not Myself said:

It is quite possible that your original Firefox profile, which contains, among other things, bookmarks, is still on your computer; however, even if it is, it may be corrupt, so that you might want to transfer, one at a time, the files in the original profile to the new one, and test before proceeding.

Here is the information about Firefox profiles:

Profile folder - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

I went to Profiles and Show Folders. I saw 3 folders under profiles. 2 were last modified 7/14 one 7/19 (today). This problem started 7/11 or 10th. I then checked the dates created, 2 were recent and one in 2012 when I bought the computer. Great.

When I opened the folder created in 2012 it only have one file called prefs which is a javascript file and is 1 kb. Is there any where to go from here?

I did a Malware scan a couple days ago btw, and although it had issues in the beginning eventually it was clean.

BigDan said:

Not Myself said:

It is quite possible that your original Firefox profile, which contains, among other things, bookmarks, is still on your computer; however, even if it is, it may be corrupt, so that you might want to transfer, one at a time, the files in the original profile to the new one, and test before proceeding.

Here is the information about Firefox profiles:

Profile folder - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

I went to Profiles and Show Folders. I saw 3 folders under profiles. 2 were last modified 7/14 one 7/19 (today). This problem started 7/11 or 10th. I then checked the dates created, 2 were recent and one in 2012 when I bought the computer. Great.

When I opened the folder created in 2012 it only have one file called prefs which is a javascript file and is 1 kb. Is there any where to go from here?

I did a Malware scan a couple days ago btw, and although it had issues in the beginning eventually it was clean.

That does not bode well at all. First of all, you were only looking at the in-use profile, not any others that may (only may) exist, and if that only showed three folders (knowing their names would certainly be useful information,) That said, I assume that there were many other non-folder entries shown in the profile, such as places.sqlite, the file that contains your current bookmarks.

So, folder names, such as bookmarkbackups? Did you look for any other Fx profiles?

Do you not regularly backup your Fx profile(s)?

What version of Fx are you using? Again, you must provide all relevant information when asking for assistance, else it is difficult, if not impossible, to help you.

Not Myself said:

BigDan said:

Not Myself said:

It is quite possible that your original Firefox profile, which contains, among other things, bookmarks, is still on your computer; however, even if it is, it may be corrupt, so that you might want to transfer, one at a time, the files in the original profile to the new one, and test before proceeding.

Here is the information about Firefox profiles:

Profile folder - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

I went to Profiles and Show Folders. I saw 3 folders under profiles. 2 were last modified 7/14 one 7/19 (today). This problem started 7/11 or 10th. I then checked the dates created, 2 were recent and one in 2012 when I bought the computer. Great.

When I opened the folder created in 2012 it only have one file called prefs which is a javascript file and is 1 kb. Is there any where to go from here?

I did a Malware scan a couple days ago btw, and although it had issues in the beginning eventually it was clean.

That does not bode well at all. First of all, you were only looking at the in-use profile, not any others that may (only may) exist, and if that only showed three folders (knowing their names would certainly be useful information,) That said, I assume that there were many other non-folder entries shown in the profile, such as places.sqlite, the file that contains your current bookmarks.

So, folder names, such as bookmarkbackups? Did you look for any other Fx profiles?

Do you not regularly backup your Fx profile(s)?

What version of Fx are you using? Again, you must provide all relevant information when asking for assistance, else it is difficult, if not impossible, to help you.

This is the directory I looked in
C:\Users\Daanish\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
In here there are 3 folders and no files. Folder names in case they're relevant

do1g1gux.default-1393096600846 (modified today, created 2/2014, 25 MB)
ftlc9tec.default (modified 7/14, created 1/2012, 4 KB)
yhgb17vv.default (modified 7/14, created 7/12, 13.8 MB)

There's no folder called bookmarkbackups in the Profiles directory but there are in the first and third subdirectories. Same goes for places.sqlite

No I never backup Firefox. Didnt know I was supposed to. Guess I'm paying the price.

I'm using Firefox 30.0

Thanks for your help :)

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if there are no files in the profile, then Fx simply ought not open, nor do anything whatsoever. I have no idea as to why Fx does anything under those conditions, as the file list in the help link I provided shows what the various files do, and without some of them, it does not seem to me that Fx would be able to open, much less run.

When you install (not update, install) Fx, the process creates a new profile with the required default files, some of which would seem to be necessary for anything to take place. Oh, hold on, I just reread your latest reply: What you are looking at are not folders, they are profiles! (That is a good example of why you must post all relevant information: What you had said about folders was misleading, unintentionally I'm sure, but misleading nonetheless.)

Close Firefox. Click on the Windows Start Button, enter "Run" (no quotes) in the search box, click on Run, then search for Firefox.exe, and put that in the run box; past the right-hand quotation mark, add `-p' (again, don't use the quotation marks.), click on OK. This should take you to a pop-up window that allows you to change the Fx profile to be used, one of which likely has your bookmarks, etc. The 4KB profile is useless, although perhaps it is actually being used. Try the two other profiles, open Fx, see what you find.

THanks man. That opened a choose your profile list. The only profile given there was called default-1393096600846. There was no other listed there that I could change it to.

I take it that's bad news..

I assume you mean within the C:\Users\Daanish\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ directory?

Over here I found 2 directories with a 'bookmarkbackups' subdir, those being the two of the 3 profiles I mentioned earlier. One of those 3 profiles was completely empty. The other 2 were created after the crash. I've checked the creation dates of the bookmark backup directories.

If you think there might still be hope let me know how you'd recommend proceeding. I've tried opening the bookmarks files in both notepad and firefox, neither of those have helped.