Mozilla Firefox: Find and Recover Lost Bookmarks
If you’ve lost or deleted an important bookmark, all isn’t lost. You can easily recover those lost or deleted bookmarks in Firefox on either Windows or macOS.
Do you know Mozilla Firefox makes a backup of your bookmarks regularly without you knowing about it? This is done separately from your Firefox cache and browsing history, so clearing those won’t affect the bookmark backups. If you accidentally lost your Firefox bookmarks and forgot to make a backup, here’s how to locate and recover them.
Find and Recover Lost Firefox Bookmarks in Windows
Mozilla Firefox automatically backs up your bookmarks once a day and maintains up to 15 of these automatic restore points. The application also provides an easy way to recover a backup, so as long as it’s been less than 15 days since you deleted the bookmark you can easily restore it.
How to Restore a Bookmark Backup in Firefox for Windows
- Launch Firefox and click the 3-line settings icon.
- Now, click Bookmarks.
- From the Bookmarks menu, click Manage bookmarks.
- Firefox’s Bookmarks Manager opens; click Import and Backup at the top of the dialog.
- Next, click Restore.
- Choose the backup you believe contains the lost Firefox bookmarks that you want to recover.
- Click OK to revert your bookmarks to the contents of the backup file.
You should note that you can also create a manual backup from the Import and Backup menu. This can be very helpful if you are about to reorganize all of your bookmarks and want an easy way to revert your changes if you get carried away.
How to Restore Lost or Deleted Bookmarks in Firefox on macOS
The process in macOS is very similar to that for Windows. Just like in Windows, Mozilla Firefox for the Mac saves a backup of your bookmarks every day. Here’s how to recover from one of those backups.
- First, launch Firefox and click the 3-line settings icon.
- Next, click Bookmarks.
- Click Manage bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu
- Click the up-and-down arrows button at the top of the Bookmarks Manager dialog.
- Next, click Restore.
- Choose the backup you believe contains the lost Firefox bookmarks that you want to recover.
- Click OK to revert your bookmarks to the contents of the backup file.
Getting Your Firefox Bookmarks Back When You Accidentally Delete Them
It can be frustrating when you accidentally delete something, like a bookmark, that you didn’t mean to. Fortunately, Mozilla Firefox offers a way to recover lost or deleted bookmarks, as long as it happened within the past 15 days. The process works the same on both Windows and Mac, with only one minor difference in how a particular button is labeled.
5 Comments
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Ziggy
December 14, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Not too long ago my hard-drive completely died. Just before it did I was able to save the AppData folder onto a portable USB drive. In that way I was able to recover all lost bookmarks as per your article for Firefox and also recover lost emails from Thunderbird.
The AppData folder is one nifty folder, because there you will find things that you might just need in case of a complete computer breakdown. So one of the first things I now do is to set a schedule using Karen’s Replicator (Microsoft SyncToy is another good backup tool) to save this folder for all my computers.
Brian Burgess
December 14, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Cool. Thanks for the tip Ziggy!
Jamison
March 13, 2013 at 7:11 am
Nice post. I was checking constantly this weblog and I am impressed!
Very helpful information particularly the final section :)
I care for such information much. I was seeking this certain
info for a long time. Thanks and good luck.
Paul
December 19, 2018 at 10:30 pm
Many , many thanks ! It’s nice to know that info can be retrieved . I thought that my work was …… GONE !
Keith Sware
May 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm
This is broken – just updated firefox – all my bookmarks were lost. tried to restore the bookmarks from the firfox backup and was met with the message UNABLE TO PROCESS THE BACKUP FILE. This backup file was created by the previous version of firefox v66.0.4. Also tried to restore other bookmark backups, in fact firefox has failed to import over 10 bookmark backups that were created by firefox. What is going wrong with firefox these days? I have just recovered from the firfox BUG that deleted all my addins and now I’m face with this.