firefox 29 crashes restoring from json
Restoring from json causes firefox 29 to hang , try with FF 27 ,also, same problem.
Have used selecting json from list and by "choose file" option. Have tried many different json files. Same problem. Regrettably , I do not have any HTML versions of these bookmarks.
Acording to FF help, I should be able to close the Library window after selecting the restoring bookmark file, but I just get the busy cursor , and clicking on the X (top right of window) results in crash.
Have tried erasing current bookmarks and did a restore , same problem.
Is there any standalone json-to-HTML converter available??
All Replies (8)
Are the JSON files particularly huge? The last part of the file name is the number of bookmarks in the file, and the file size would be reported by Windows.
I'm not aware of any converters for Firefox's bookmark backup format, but there are some tools to check whether the JSON data is valid in general. Unfortunately that wouldn't guarantee it's clean of glitches that could choke the restore code...
It is about 6.5 MB large . I have waited for a few minutes thinking it might be a large file for json. I do not have any bookmark backups smaller than 6MB.
Where is the working bookmark stored anyway? I removed the bookmark backup directory and the browser still read the bookmark, so it is getting it from somewhere.
Modified by mmoxxy
How many bookmark are in the JSON backup?
The xxxx part in the file name of the JSON backup (bookmarks-####-##-##_xxxx.json) shows the number of bookmarks stored in the backup.
There are methods described in this MozillaZine forum thread to extract links from from a bookmarks JSON backup.
about 26,000. How long does it take to restore these bookmarks?? Any idea?
Besides importing the bookmarks , I would like to know why it crashes.
I want to clarify that 26000 is what is behind the filename, I am not sure that I really have that many bookmarks , but all my json files are with similar ranged number 26000. Looking at my bookmark list , it doesn't look like I have that many bookmarks.
Modified by mmoxxy
Seems large. Mine shows 5354 bookmarks using 1.4MB.
(I think some of mine definitely are duplicates, but since I find cleaning up bookmarks about as much fun as cleaning out a closet, it just doesn't happen.)
Your live bookmarks are in the places.sqlite database, along with history entries. The bookmarkbackups folder is tapped if Firefox cannot find that database, to reconstruct a new one. Since the reconstruction doesn't work, you definitely should make a backup copy of places.sqlite "just in case".
Well, this is embarrassing. I guess I do have that many bookmarks since I left the "restore" running and returned to it after several hours , it went through. I am not saying it took that long but probably more than a few min.s .
I guess it is time to do some house cleaning after all these years. I have the list since the Mosaic days , so I guess it gets piled up. Some of the sites are probably defunct.
"Your live bookmarks are in the places.sqlite database,...."
I suspected as much since it is also a large file.
Actually, I manually make copies of the profile folder , not just the bookmarks. Actually the whole user directory so settings of other programmes are saved also.
I will try another restore from another json file after work and make sure it really works , so don't close this thread just yet!
Modified by mmoxxy
CheckPlaces works for finding duplicates and for checking the validity of bookmarks. I check the ones that it says are not working because sometimes the browser is better at opening bookmarks than the extension is. There is an updated version here:
Thanks, I give it a try.