emeralddragon said

but it wont recognize the json bookmark file

What do you mean be this?

Bookmark / History Backups

Type about:support<Enter> in the address bar.

Under the page logo on the left side you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Folder. To it’s right press the button Show Folder. This will open your file browser to the current Firefox profile. Now Close Firefox.

Enter the bookmarkbackups folder. This is where Firefox makes backups of your bookmarks. Look for the jsonlz4 file you want to restore (check the time / date / size). Right click on that file and select Copy. Now go back to the profile folder where you started. Rename the file places.sqlite by adding .old to it. Now right click in the folder and select Paste. The file you just pasted here, rename it to places.sqlite. After you are done, restart Firefox.

Se also:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks_history_and_toolbar_buttons_not_working_-_Firefox
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Bookmarks+not+saved#w_fix-the-bookmarks-file

• Places Maintenance: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/

emeralddragon said

my computer crashed and i need to restore my bookmarks but it wont recognize the json bookmark file. it is real nice of firefox to update how bookmarks are saved and not tell people so they know to change their backups WTF

it is not a .jsonlz4 it is simply a .json file. the NEW backups are lz4 but firefox neglected to tell anyone so MY backup is still .json.

emeralddragon said

it is not a .jsonlz4 it is simply a .json file. the NEW backups are lz4

Can you post the full file name of one of them?

bookmarks-2014-06-15_759.json

as u see it was saved in june 2014 before firefox decided obviously to change the bookmark format without letting us know. now i need these bookmarks restored

Only automatic bookmark backup are in compressed .jsonlz4 format. A backup that you make manually is always in uncompressed JSON format to make it possible to open the file for inspection. There shouldn't be a problem to restore such JSON backup.

You can open this bookmarks JSON backup in the Scratchpad (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer). Click the "Pretty Print" button to format the file.

You can check for problems with the places.sqlite database file in the Firefox profile folder.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks_history_and_toolbar_buttons_not_working_-_Firefox
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Bookmarks+not+saved#w_fix-the-bookmarks-file

• Places Maintenance: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/

Type about:config<enter> in the address bar. If a warning screen comes up, press the Be Careful button. At the top of the screen is a search bar. Type; browser.bookmarks.max_backups What is its current value? I use 30 on mine.

mine was 15 i changed it to 30. it still says unable to process. i am thinking because it is NOW looking for the new extension with compressed content and cannot read the old version

Well done. This will have Firefox store about a month of backups.

Current Firefox versions only save a new backup if there are changes to bookmarks to avoid losing older backups by saving a new backup each day. This is done by adding a hash value to the file name in addition of the total number ($$$$ in bookmarks-####-##-##_xxxx_$$$$.jsonlz4).

The most likely cause is still a problem with the places.sqlite and places.sqlite-* files

ok thats great but i still need my store backups from the json file that it isnt processing. i have bookmarks that are irreplaceable in that file and need firefox to accept the older backup file

so i tried to open it with the scratchpad and it says failed to convert file to unicode from UTF-8. the pretty thing didnt do anything..i imagine because it failed to load it in the first place

Sounds that the file is corrupted and possibly contains binary data. You would have to check the file in other text editor or in a hex viewer program to see if the file only has plain text ASCII content.