Retreive Old Firefox Bookmarks After Formatting

Question

I have recently formatted my Laptop. However I forgot to export my bookmarks before formatting .What I have now is a folder named as Windows.old ..... but I don't know how to recover my lost bookmarks. Is there a way so that I can get my old bookmarks ..... i.e. I could import my old bookmarks .... into the new installation ?

Solution

The folder Windows.old contains your previous Windows installation. Its presence means that you have not formatted the hard disk, but have rather reinstalled Windows as a new installation in the unformatted disk.

If I am right about that misuse of the term "formatting", then there is still hope. Your bookmarks may still exist somewhere on the disk.

Search your hard disk for a file named bookmarks.html. You have not specified your Windows version, but in Vista or 7 you will find it in :
C:\Users\[user-name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile-name].default.

There might be several versions of it, if you have reinstalled Firefox and were lucky enough for it to have picked up a different profile name the second time. If there is only one, then Firefox has probably over-written it (verify, just in case).

Verify that this file contains your old bookmarks - you can just double-click on it to open in a browser.

Now follow the instructions in Import bookmarks. For Firefox 3:
Menu Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks -> Import and Backup -> Import HTML... -> from an HTML File.

Browse to the folder containing the file, select bookmarks.html and click "open". The imported bookmarks will be added to your existing bookmarks.

Comments

[kamalbhai]

thnx buddy ..... I have got my problem solved ....The old bookmarks were lying in the path u had mentioned .....but in the folder created for windows.old

[kamalbhai]

moreover the extension of the file was not .html .

[kamalbhai]

It was .json and such files exist due to the backup files created by Mozilla Firefox !!!!

[harrymc]

You were really lucky : I don't have a .json in my Firefox profile.

[kamalbhai]

u might hv asked firefox not to backup ur book marks ....

[DavidPostill]

Did you notice that jsonlz4 is the same as your user name? Anybody else looking for this file won't find it, so your answer is useless.