I dont know why this has been posted on the US questions page...I am in the UK.

Cheers, Bob, I think all the English posts go into one forum, so everyone with any kind of English will see your post.

I suspect there is some odd issue with your Places database, the file that stores bookmarks and history. Before taking further action, could you make a safety backup and export. The following articles have the steps:

• Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer
• Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks

Do those seem to be an ample size? You can actually open the exported HTML page in a tab to see what's in there.

- - - -

Then try the built-in database maintenance utility on Firefox's Troubleshooting Information page. You can open that using any of these methods:

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
• (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
• type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

Near the bottom, there is a section titled Places Database -- that's the file which stores history and bookmarks. Click the button labeled Verify Integrity. There may be a 10-15 second delay before results appear.

If all is well, the report that appears below the button should start with:

> Task: checkIntegrity
+ The places.sqlite database is sane
+ The favicons.sqlite database is sane

Does yours say that, or something else? You can select and copy the report, and then paste it into a reply for review and comment.

After the databases are cleaned up, any improvement with the search time?

Hi... Apologies for the delay in replying...Its been a bit hectic over here for the past couple of days...I managed to do the first two steps, creating the back up and creating an HTML file of my bookmarks, and then being able to look into it on my desktop. I can see the same folder time after time...

Before I did this, I did a search on a random word that I know I had created a bookmark in the past...As usual it took the standard 8 minutes, and what I found was, 22 incidences of this word and ALL were identical bookmarks, making me think, could I have 22 copies of every bookmark I have ever saved?...I went onto find that apparently (by running my mouse over the restore button) I have over 170,000 bookmarks......could this be the simple answer...This is as far as I have gone at the moment...altho will read further into your reply after I send this.

Hi Bob, sometimes the Sync service can cause extreme bookmark duplication. This may be a little complicated to clean up while you are still Sync'ing your bookmarks. You can use the Options page to adjust Sync settings so that bookmarks are not sync'd while you clean up.

I think(thought) I have Sync disabled, as I only use Firefox on the one machine, so didnt need it, altho it could have been on, on my previous machine(a month ago)...I will check the setting....Do I have to clean up manually, or have I missed an instruction.

Syncing is marked as: OFF

I checked the integrity of the Places Database and the first 3 lines are the same as you mention.

I have found what appears to be a Mozilla recommended Bookmarks clean up tool.....its been running for 5 minutes....so will see what it reports.

It says there are 2024 duplicates...theres is one I have noticed is duplicated 86 times....

Is it possible that the 2024 duplicates means that 2024 original bookmarks have been duplicated, and as in the example above, some up to(or even more than) 86 times...meaning there could be well over 100,000 duplicates in total..

Apologies for the short replies...

The name of an automatically created JSON bookmarks backup in the bookmarkbackups folder includes a total item count (folders and separators included) and an hash value to prevent saving the same backup more than once. You also see this count in the Restore menu drop-down list.

• bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.jsonlz4.
• Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks -> Import & Backup -> Restore

Hi...thanks for that...I mentioned above I noticed a count of over 170,000 after hovering my mouse ove the Restore command. It is the amount of actual duplicates that I am trying to find out......and get rid of safely.

Hi Bob, I have never heard of that many bookmarks. Could you make a fresh JSON Backup and see whether the Verify Integrity routine results in a smaller file?

The file indicates that the number of bookmarks is the same.....but...I havent acted on any results as yet....should i use the Bookmarks clean up extension to delete all the duplicates, and then rename my old file(in case it goes wrong), then create a new Json backup.

Isn't there a JSON backup available that has a more realistic bookmarks count ?

By the way, the number on the Restore menu is an item count, including bookmarks, folders, and separators, and perhaps other things. So the real number of bookmarks could well be much lower if there are "garbage" items in the database that are getting saved in the backup files.

I can't seem to create another Json backup....The last 2 I created were both the same size in kb...How do I see what is in the files.......and how do i know if I have garbage or not...I think I'll restart Firefox again...

My last 3 backups are all 50,144 kb each....

Should I use the bookmarks clean up extension to get rid of the duplicates, and then backup

I think the de-duplicating extension is worth a try. I fear it might choke on the volume, but I don't have a better suggestion at the moment.

Before I do this, should I have done something that makes you think that the number of bookmarks should have reduced...Have i missed something out...if I havent, why, with what I have done above, should it have cured my problem...AFAIK I havent made a command to get rid of any duplicates.

Are the duplicates located in the same folder or are full folders duplicated?

Extensions use JavaScript to do their work and cleaning up 170.000 bookmarks via JavaScript will likely take a very long time.