One reason I love Firefox

Posted by maca on November 3, 2006 Leave a comment (4) Go to comments

I had a bit of a mishap yesterday. I installed Firefox on a PC at work, installed the Foxmarks extension to download my bookmarks which are stored online, changed my mind, disabled the extension (but forgot to restart) and deleted the bookmarks. When I got home I noticed that Foxmarks had overwritten the online bookmark file with the ‘deleted version’ so I lost 90% of my bookmarks. (yes I am an idiot)
But thankfully, as of ver 1.5, Fx makes back-ups of your bookmarks, which I discovered after a panicked Google search, so I simply had to copy and paste the bookmark back-up file.

A bit of background info for you …

• Fx bookmarks are stored in a single file called bookmarks.html which is normally (on windows) located at:

C:\Documents and Settings\your-name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qwerty.default

- your Application Data folder may be hidden by default but can be shown by going, on your windows explorer menu to Tools > Folder Options > View tab, click show hidden files and folders

• Fx also makes backups by default. A single back-up called bookmarks.bak which can be found here:

C:\Documents and Settings\your-name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qwerty.default

… and 5 daily back-ups of your bookmarks which you can usually find here:

C:\Documents and Settings\your-name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qwerty.default\bookmarkbackups

• The daily back-ups are named by date, example: bookmarks-2006-11-03.html. Only 5 copies are stored and old files are overwritten.

Your bookmarks can easily be restored by replacing bookmarks.html with any of the daily back-ups, by copy and pasting the file or by going to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks… -> File -> Import… -> from File on your Fx menu.

If you want Fx to make more than 5 back-ups just type about:config into the address bar. Then type browser.bookmarks.max_backups, double click on the number 5 and change it to whatever you want.

Sin é. Hope it saves you some trouble.

Internet
Leave a comment

4 Comments.

  1. Cormac November 5, 2006 at 9:56 pm

    I just wrote a long post but your challange response thing borked it up. Said i got the sum wrong but of course then the post i wrote vanished which isn’t really nice.

    Anyway, check out blinklist. And the blinklist plugin for firefox. It allows you to add favourites to your online a/c on blinklist.com

    http://www.blinklist.com/cormacmoylan

  2. maca November 6, 2006 at 12:22 am

    Sorry about that Cormac, same thing happened to me recently, i must try to get an alternative spam script.

    Cheers for the link, i’ll check it out.

  3. RamblingMan November 9, 2006 at 1:54 pm

    i dl-ed IE7 the other day and it made shit of my whole PC never mind bookmarks or anything else browser related – stay well away

  4. maca November 12, 2006 at 5:35 pm

    Can’t say i’ve had any such problems. The only problem I encountered so far, apart from the browser being absolute shite, was it’s problem displaying CSS on documents stored on my hard drive. haven’t figured out a solution for that just yet.