Deleting bookmarks folder does not actually delete bookmarks
I have split my default Firefox into two separate profiles, one for me, one for my partner. In the default profile, we spent lots of time organizing the bookmarks into two folders, one for each of us. Then I made two copies of the profile folder, named them, and created new profiles by editing the profiles.ini file. This worked fine. We now have a working profile each, and the original default profile as a backup. So each of us opens our new Firefox profile and wants to delete the bookmarks that are not ours. We delete the folder. But all the bookmarks are still there. What has gone wrong here? Surely we don't have to delete them one at a time?
All Replies (3)
I'm not sure what you actually did with organizing the bookmarks into two folders, but Firefox stores the bookmarks in the places.sqlite database and keeps backups in the bookmarkbackups folder.
Copying and renaming profile folders or editing profiles.ini is usually not a good idea. You should use the Profile Manager or the about:profiles page to manage multiple profiles.
You can (should) backup your personal data if you want to have a backup.
Thank you cor-el. I have deleted the new profiles and repeated the process to see whether the problem occurs again, and it does. Each new profile has two identical sets of bookmark folders, one in the bookmark toolbar, the other in the ordinary folders. When I delete one, the other remains there. I thought perhaps that the toolbar folders were a sort of notional display of the underlying real folders, but this is evidently not so, and I have to delete everything twice. Is there an explanation for this?
If you have multiple copies of the same bookmark in different Bookmark folders then you need to remove each copy in both places if you do this via the right-click context menu. Only if you click the highlighted star in the location bar when you have opened a bookmarked link then can can remove all copies of a specific bookmark at once (it should show a count).