Folders missing from Bookmarks after update to Firefox 9
First, system info: I'm on Mac OS 10.5.8 I was using Firefox 3 until yesterday when I updated to 9. Had no apparent problems with bookmarks after the update but I had not closed the session; it was only after starting up this morning that all my bookmark folders are missing from the Bookmarks Menu.
I've been through all the "lost bookmarks" sections of Firefox - no answers there to my specific problem. Most of them focus on bookmarks being completely missing - but in my case it's only the Folders that are missing.
Here are at least some of the pages I've looked at and been through all the suggestions that were relevant: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Lost%20Bookmarks http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks#Bookmarks_missing_after_restarting https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-questions-after-upgrading-firefox-36 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/latest-firefox-issues
There was a momentary power-down yesterday, but the folders were still there when the power came back on, so that's not it.
There was one anomaly with the way my bookmarks WERE. That is, when I selected Bookmarks from the top navigation bar, go down the drop-down past Bookmarks Toolbar, instead of all my folders being displayed there, I'd have to go to Bookmarks Menu and then to a side panel of the Menu which showed a folder saying All Bookmarks and from there I'd have to go to another side panel that opened off that to access the list of all my folders and run down to select one. This strange functionality came after some previous update, never could fix that and got no help with it. So I just put up with having more mouse work to get to my sites.
This is a serious problem for me - I am in training on SEO, internet marketing, Wordpress, etc plus running another business. EVERYTHING I rely upon for my work was meticulously organized into those folders, which now seem to be gone.
Are there any seriously technical people in Firefox/Mozilla who can go deeper than the stuff suggested on their websites?
All Replies (7)
To Lucy: Here it is Tuesday morning in Adelaide, South Australia, and I have my backup drive out of storage. I got the September 2011 Profiles folder, saved it to my desktop and started testing the backup jsons on my re-installed version of Firefox 3.6.25 (in which those September jsons were created originally). Here's the weird bit: it could not load my folders! From a json it made itself! And yet it CAN load my folders from the May 2010 json. So somewhere between May 2010 and September 2011, something went rotten in the barrel. I have no idea what to do, except to email you my most important bookmarks backup that I can't get to load my folders, plus the May 2010 one that does work, for comparison, and see if you can get them to work in your own Firefox 9. I tried putting the json into json2html, and the message came back: syntax error.
Oops! Lucy I forgot to ask if it's OK to email you the 2 files, and if you want to give me your email address? I'm at [email protected], http://au.linkedin.com/in/diannetrussell
See also this MozillaZine forum thread:
Thanks cor-el, I've now tried everything they suggested with bookmarklets etc, nothing works. Don't know what to do next.
To all you wonderful helpful people an update (some good news):
It's not the bookmarks per se that are lost, it's all the folders I created in bookmarks that are lost. The loose bookmarks that didn't matter much are all there!
Last week I already did all of what you suggested, and much more. I have tried the jsons from current version of FF, from saved version on a backup drive, from saved version on a USB stick, tried them in FF9, re-installed and tried them in FF 3.6.25 in which they were created in the first place, tried them in FF7 on my laptop and tried them in FF10 - ALL STUFFED! I think the auto backup function of FF has been producing corrupted jsons. I did everything that everyone suggested and nothing brought back my folders. As you can see I'm well past all the basic and usual stuff.
Then I had an INSPIRATION:
LOGIC: When I was on Firefox 3.6.25 on 28 January, all my folders displayed. Then I upgraded to Firefox 9 and still all my folders were displaying while the computer was on. Then I shut down for the night and the folders were gone next day. Logic is that since they were displaying on FF 9 before I shut down, it means the information was still in the Firefox folder somewhere, even though the backups were crap. Thereafter neither FF 3.6.25 nor 9 nor 10 could read folders but I'd only been trying from the Backups!
So I took a copy of the whole Firefox folder from my Application Support bup from 12 January and over-wrote it into the current Application Support, then re-launched FF 3.6.25 and hey presto! The folders from 12 Jan were there. So they must be somewhere in the profile.
Next question was: is there any PROFILE FOLDER from Jan 28th or 27th that will work? Haven't found one yet.... meanwhile I am just using my 12 January set of folders and racking my brains to remember the missing 2 weeks work on the internet!
Any other suggestions welcome....
I looked through bugzilla but came up empty ... but this article has a suggestion:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locked_or_damaged_places.sqlite#If_a_places.sqlite.corrupt_file_exists
If a places.sqlite.corrupt file exists
If your Firefox profile folder includes a "places.sqlite.corrupt" file, one reported fix is to open the Firefox profile folder and, after closing Firefox completely, delete or rename the places.sqlite file and then rename "places.sqlite.corrupt" to "places.sqlite". (If you see any other places.sqlite* files, delete those as well, so that only one places.sqlite file remains.) It is possible that certain security or "cleanup" software (e.g., CCleaner) is causing the places.sqlite file corruption. It is also possible that Firefox was not closed properly, as might happen when your computer loses power with Firefox running, which can cause a corrupt places.sqlite file.
EDIT: Never mind. I see from reviewing page 1 that your profile folder didn't contain a places.sqlite.corrupt file. Oh well. I tried.
Modified by AliceWyman
Try to export the bookmarks that you recovered from that backup to an HTML file.
- Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import & Backup > Export HTML
Such a file is easier to manage and importing an HTML merges bookmarks instead of replacing all bookmarks like restoring a JSON backup does.