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I just did a routine upgrade of my Firefox from 3.6.4 to 3.6.6 and lost most of my bookmarks. The bookmarks I have now are the ones I had about six months ago. Nothing that happened during the update process indicated any kind of problem to me (warnings, crashes, "unable to update foo at this time" messages). I did update a handful of add-ons for 3.6.6; mostly big ones like AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and the like.

I've found three resources about this but none were useful:

The one thing I did glean from those resources is that FF seems to like to keep lots of copies of bookmarks around. Is there somewhere else I can go to manually restore the old ones, or at least find the URLs so I can load them and re-bookmark them manually? A more automatic solution would be preferred, but I'm not holding out too much hope for that.

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  • You should look into xmarks... might save you some trouble in the future. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410
    – John
    Jun 29, 2010 at 14:51
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    Thanks, that does look useful. Although I might just use this as an opportunity to test-drive Chrome or Opera as my primary browser.
    – Pops
    Jun 29, 2010 at 14:58

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In Firefox 1.5 and above, 5 daily bookmark backup files are saved in the "bookmarkbackups" folder (in .json format), located in the Firefox profile folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\<user_name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\bookmarkbackups

Mozilla states that you must recover one of these 5 backups before they are overwritten by newer versions. In your case, it is strange that

the last backup was made today after the problem started, and the previous one was made six months ago.

Did you check that whether Firefox created a new profile after the update? If there is only one profile, I don't think you can find your lost bookmarks anymore.

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  • I thought that was strange too, I'm glad it's not just me. I do have five backup files, but four of them are at least six months old, and the most recent one is useless. FF did not create a new profile; I have separate profiles for FF 3.5 (now 3.6) and FF 2, but I haven't used FF 2 (either the browser or the profile) in almost a year.
    – Pops
    Jun 29, 2010 at 14:44
  • It is now useless to say that the reason for FF couldn't create proper bookmark backups could be that your places.sqlite file somehow got corrupted. Mozilla has a solution for this whereas it's useless in your case: kb.mozillazine.org/Locked_or_damaged_places.sqlite Jun 29, 2010 at 14:51

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