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How to retrieve my bookmarks, tabs, history, etc, from the Mozilla server after a clean reinstall of my OS?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Before I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8, I synced my firefox. I performed a clean install of Windows 8, meaning I wiped my C: drive. After the install of Windows 8, I was unable to retrieve my personal data from the Mozilla server. The browser is telling me to sync my stuff with another device but I saw, when syncing for the first time, the browser said something along the lines of "Backing up your data to Mozilla servers." How do I retrieve my data from those servers?

Before I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8, I synced my firefox. I performed a clean install of Windows 8, meaning I wiped my C: drive. After the install of Windows 8, I was unable to retrieve my personal data from the Mozilla server. The browser is telling me to sync my stuff with another device but I saw, when syncing for the first time, the browser said something along the lines of "Backing up your data to Mozilla servers." How do I retrieve my data from those servers?

Chosen solution

Yes it does. You can probably recovery your profile from there (keep in mind it is a hidden folder, so enable hidden files and folders) Recover important data from an old profile

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Do you have the recovery key you were given when you created your Sync account?

Please note that Sync is NOT a backup tool and should never be used as such. ALWAYS make a hard copy of your Firefox data before doing anything like a Windows reinstall.

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I'm afraid I don't have a recovery key. I had years of bookmarks and stuff there, it would be extremely devastating to lose all that.

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In that case, no, it cannot be recovered. If you had a backup of your profile we could help you import that but you apparently do not. So unfortunately that information is gone.

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I do have my whole C:\Users\'myusername' folder backed up. Does that help with anything?

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Chosen Solution

Yes it does. You can probably recovery your profile from there (keep in mind it is a hidden folder, so enable hidden files and folders) Recover important data from an old profile

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Oh my god it worked!!! Thank you so much, this is very important to me!! Is there any way I can recover my last session from that profile folder as well?

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You would need to copy the sessionstore.js from that profile to the current Firefox Profile Folder to get that last session.