Backup and Restore Firefox Bookmarks

Firefox

I did a repair for a friend more recently and I felt really bad that her bookmarks where lost when I returned the computer to her, of course they where already gone when I got the machine. So the moral of that story is don’t let people that don’t know crap work on your computer.

To get back on point here there is a nice little feature in Firefox that backs up the bookmarks daily to a json file or optionally to an html file. Since I took a backup of the system I started poking around this morning and found that there is indeed a backup of all the bookmarks she had before things started going downhill.

First you will want to navigate to the directory below. The ****PROFILE**** line will be random characters with a .default extension.

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\****PROFILE****\bookmarkbackups\

Or on Windows 7 and Vista

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\***PROFILE****\bookmarkbackups\

Once you are there you will see that there are a few backup files in json format. These backup files will have the date in them but for the most part you can see which one in the last few days is the biggest and chances are that will be the one you want to use.

Now that you have the json file you can copy it to your desktop or wherever you will easily be able to find it.

If you would like to replace all Firefox bookmarks start Firefox in safe mode first and choose to delete bookmarks.

When Firefox starts or restarts click on Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks

Organize Bookmarks

Once the Organize Bookmarks window opens you can click on Import and Backup  -> Restore -> Choose File then point Firefox to the json file you placed on your desktop.

Choose File

You can also use this same method to restore other backups you may have as well as html backups. Once Firefox is done importing you may have to restart to see your bookmarks restored but you are all done.

Good thing Firefox did some backing up and thinking for us otherwise what else would we have done? I would recommend using Foxmarks Xmarks XmarkX or whatever they call it now to automatically sync your bookmarks with their server, also handy when you have more than 1 computer or when you use a portable version of Firefox.