Join the Mozilla’s Test Days event from Dec 2–8 to test the new Firefox address bar on Firefox Beta 134 and get a chance to win Mozilla swag vouchers! 🎁

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

I created a new places database and instead of clearing today's bookmarks it cleared my entire bookmarks toolbar and won't restore. Help!

more options

Firefox was hanging like crazy, so I followed the advice on mozilla support and created a new places database by renaming the file as directed. When I reopened Firefox, my entire bookmarks toolbar was GONE and when I attempted to restore as per mozilla support, it says "unable to process file". I see other people have had this problem but was unable to understand how the fix was effected. This is ridiculous! The article said it would delete *today's* bookmarks (of which I had none), and instead it deleted ALL of them from forever! Please fix your article about Mozilla hanging to be accurate, and help me fix my bookmarks!

Firefox was hanging like crazy, so I followed the advice on mozilla support and created a new places database by renaming the file as directed. When I reopened Firefox, my entire bookmarks toolbar was GONE and when I attempted to restore as per mozilla support, it says "unable to process file". I see other people have had this problem but was unable to understand how the fix was effected. This is ridiculous! The article said it would delete *today's* bookmarks (of which I had none), and instead it deleted ALL of them from forever! Please fix your article about Mozilla hanging to be accurate, and help me fix my bookmarks!

All Replies (2)

more options

Do you have compressed .jsonlz4 backup present in the bookmarkbackups folder?

  • Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks -> Import & Backup -> Restore

You did remove all places.sqlite files (i.e. including possible places.sqlite-shm and places.sqlite-wal) with Firefox closed?

Firefox would normally try to rebuild places.sqlite from the most recent backup in the bookmarkbackups folder when all places.sqlite files are removed.

You usually get "unable to process file" when places.sqlite is corrupted.


You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.

more options

Sorry to hear that your backups cannot be restored. I have a tool on my website to decompress a backup file and convert it to an HTML format that perhaps you will be able to import.

The backup files are in the bookmarkbackups folder that cor-el mentioned, which is in the same profile as the places.sqlite file you renamed.