Ogsdammit! I use Firefox. I sat down this morning to a box that said something along the lines of “do you want to import your bookmarks from Internet Explorer?” or something like that. Figuring husband was doing something weird last night, and knowing we haven’t used Explorer in about 3 years now, I clicked no, and brought up Firefox. It took me, instead of to my home page, to an advertisement for AVG’s newest software. (I use AVG’s free antivirus; they want me to buy the whole shebang.) Hmmm…clicked the cute little foxyface again and this time got my homepage with no AVG ad.
But no bookmarks. No…I don’t know what they’re called - the permanent links in that toolbar above my tabs, where I save things like “SDMB” because I’m too lazy to even click in the bookmarks. And no dictionary Add-on, either, which I previously had installed. And I’m having to enter my username and password in every site where it was previously remembered. WTF? And, more importantly, how do I get those things back? And how do I prevent this from happening in the future?
Thanks. I ran the %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and there’s only one profile folder, marked “default”. When I go into that, I get several folders, including one marked “bookmarkbackups”, and many individual files, including one named “bookmarks-1.html” which is only 28 KB and, when clicked, lists only Firefox’s default bookmarks, and another file, “bookmarks.html” which is 248 KB and lists my bookmarks when clicked. Would deleting “bookmarks-1.html” be useful? (And safe?)
Inside the bookmarkbackups folder are five files, each labeled something like, “bookmarks-2008-03-22.html” which look from the numbers to be from the last 5 days. All of those, when clicked, list my bookmarks.
So it looks like Firefox still knows what my bookmarks *should *be, but they’re just not in my bookmarks. I guess this is good news, because all of those listed appear to be active links, so I guess I can rebuild my bookmark folder manually by going to each of those pages and re-bookmarking them again. But I’d rather not do all that work! (See above re: lazy.)
When you get it working again, get this, MozBackup!
CMC +fnord!
You might want to look through the other extension sites too, I’m still running 1.5 and I have an extension that auto backups basically everything every time I close FF.
WAG but I’d be more inclined to copy all your bookmarks from “bookmarks.html” into “Bookmarks-1.html”
Looks like it has lost a pointer somewhere along the way.
I don’t recall how I did it but I made a backup of my bookmarks on the Linux machine then transferred them to this one (Vista) using those files.
I wouldn’t delete anything except as a last resort.
Check the date of the last Firefox update, maybe something went wrong then. If you uninstall/reinstall Firefox it might work again, mine always does as uninstalling doesn’t remove the profiles. (I can’t update with Vista, doesn’t work, always have to do a clean install).
As I was trying to print out Myglaren’s linked directions, my Firefox did one of those “error, we have to close, so sorry, toots!” things, and when I brought it back up, all my bookmarks and stuff are back, including the cookies and saved passwords at other sites and the thefreedictionary.com Add-on!
I didn’t restart the computer or anything. I mean, yay and all, but…just feckin’ weird. This couldn’t be a virus indicator, could it? (AVG has automatic updates and does a scan every day.)
So, uh, thanks everyone, I guess! At least I know what to do if it happens again.
ETA: Huh. And now the Dope doesn’t think I was here before - all my subscribed threads are signaling there are new posts in threads that haven’t been posted to since yesterday (which I’ve already read, of course.) Curiouser and curiouser…
Wow. Almost the same thing just happened to me, except when it asked whether or not I wanted to import bookmarks I clicked cancel. (Although, now that I think about it, I don’t remember if there were three buttons - yes, no, cancel - or just two, yes or cancel.) Anyway, it brought me to the same avg page you saw but I didn’t lose toolbar items or, seemingly, password settings. Also, I have been on the web since 11 AM or so, and the import bookmarks box appeared anyway (I had closed all webpages and gone to get something to eat, and the box was there when I came back).
Not sure if this information is at all helpful, but you never know.
