FireFox Bookmarks: Backing up and Recovering

While I have never had this happen to me personally, I know several folks who have started up their Firefox to discover all or some of their bookmarks are gone. If this happens to you…Don’t panic! All is not lost! A cool feature with Firefox is it keeps a back-up of your bookmarks for the past five days. Recovering your bookmarks is very easy:

1. From the Bookmarks Menu select Manage Bookmarks… (Fx 1.5) or Organize Bookmarks… (Fx 2.0 & 3.0).
2. This opens the Bookmarks Manager window. From the File menu, select Import
3. Click the button for From File and click Next>
4. You will need to navigate to your Profile Folder. From there you will see a sub folder called bookmarkbackups, navigate to this folder.
5. Select any of the five bookmarks-XXXX-XX-XX.html files in the folder. Tip: normally you should select the most recent back-up, however if the file size of that back-up is much smaller than the others, select a larger sized back-up. Click Open.
6. Firefox will rebuild your bookmark list and you will see all your bookmarks listed in the Bookmarks Manager Window. Close the Bookmarks Manager Window.

Keep in mind, if you have added any bookmarks since the point you had lost your bookmarks, you may end up with duplicates. To remove, simply right-click on the duplicate bookmark and select delete.