Super Firefox Tip: Find Your Backup Bookmarks

My only complaint with Firefox is that it is still prone to crashing, especially on my equally crash-prone notebook (due to be decommissioned any day now). But yesterday the 'Fox hit me with its worst crash yet. After rebooting, I found that all of my bookmarks had been wiped out, completely.

This was not good. I back up my bookmarks periodically but hadn't done so in a couple of weeks, which means that all the bookmarks to stories I'd recently read that I wanted to blog about were gone. Oh, the humanity!

I'm sure I needn't tell you more about why losing your bookmarks is a bad thing. But a found the good news when I went hunting for a way to try to recover from the problem: Firefox saves a backup copy of your bookmarks, just in case. Or rather, it saves five copies, one every day for five days.

The first thing you have to do to recover these lost bookmarks is find them. This is kind of a pain, because they're buried. Here's where (under Windows XP at least). Browse using Windows Explorer to: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<gibberish>.default\bookmarkbackups. The username and gibberish fields will be unique on your computer, of course. There you'll find five files with obvious names (see the screenshot above). Copy the most recent one and drop it in your My Documents folder to make it easier during the next step.

Now, in Firefox, simply click Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. Now click File > Import Bookmarks and select "From File." In the next step, just browse to the My Documents folder and pick the backup file you just placed there. Click Open to finish the operation and you're done; all your bookmarks should be back where you expected.

The complete documentation for this feature is found here.

I know this is a tip that you won't need every day, but it just might save your hide sometime. I'd tell you to bookmark this post so you can find it when you do finally need it but that may not help this time...