Updated firefox and lost some of my bookmarks - also using xmarks and havingprob

Sorry I couldn't put an error message in the subject line. Here's the problem:

recently updated Firefox to 4.1. Then just recently I got another update alert and updated again and as it was shutting down to restart, xmarks, a bookmark sync service, synced my bookmarks with those that i archived on the server. Thing is ever since that restart, my favorites list only seems to have remembered all of my favorites going up to late summer 2010.

So i looked at the Xmarks bookmarks restore thing and it gave me the option of choosing which date's bookmarks I wanted to restore. Soooo I previewed a few and found which date was correct. The preview btw basically takes you to a web page view list of your favorites. Anyhow, I told xmarks to restore and it did its in-process thing and then told me it had completed the task. And I checked to make sure it had done it, and my bookmark list was unchanged!

So I did some research and found out how to do the bookmarks restore within firefox, add-ons not withstanding. And it, too, told me when it completed the task, and nothing had changed.

So for kicks, i went back to the page view that had my desired backup list of bookmarks and I picked a link on there that wasn't showing up in the in-FF list. I searched the list for said link, by name, and even though it wasn't coming up when i scrolled through manually, it was coming up in the search. So I tried a few more and they all came up in the search.

So the data isn't lost, just everything is screwed up. I copied that page's links all into a word file. I think the file is now like 80 pages long or so. I saved it, of course, and also saved the page so i can get it again offline.

However right now I am utterly flummoxed.

Please pardon the lack of technical data. There was none to offer.

I thought Firefox had a Bookmarks Import from html function. I'm running 4.0.1 and don't see it.

Internet Explorer does have an Import function that may work.

Not elegant, but this might work. I haven't tested it. Only a theory:

1) Use Internet Explorer to import your Favorites from the Word document. You'll probably have to save that Word doc as an html file first.

2) Use Firefox's import function to then import the Favorites from Internet Explorer.

I forgot to mention I'm running a Mac with the latest OS.

I run a Mac. Still on Tiger. I'm pretty active in my local Mac User Group which has about 170 members. I haven't heard anyone having issues. But then again, I think most of them use Safari.

Back to your issue. It looks like Safari will import bookmarks from an html file. It also looks like Firefox will import bookmarks from Safari.

Try my first suggestion only use Safari instead of IE.

Save your Word file as html.
Import the html into Safari.
Then using Firefox, import the Safair bookmarks.

just a theory

There is no "bookmarks.html" file anywhere on my machine. Meanwhile, how do I save a word file as .html? It gives me the option of saving to .xml but not html.

So I decided to try another thing - i went back to the xmarks page that had the complete list of my bookmarks and saved that as .html. Only thing is it isn't all links on there. there's plain text too. In any event, how do I import that into Safari?

Is there any way to fix this through xmarks? The xmarks forums are useless for this. They're underpopulated too.

Last edited by jon.mandelbaum on 13th May 2011, 12:22 am; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : thoguht of something else to add)

My version of Word is 2004. If I choose Save As, under Format, there's an option for Web Page (HTML).

I'm pretty sure Word 2011 has the same 'Save As' feature.

Ok its saved as html but it's not just links. its got plain text in there too.


Meanwhile FF has told me it has to update again and so i told it to so and its been "downloading firefox" for the past three hours. what do I do?

Firefox 4 is a 27 MB file. If you're on dial-up, it may take a few hours. If you're on DSL, Cable, or FIOS, it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

Ok its saved as html but it's not just links. its got plain text in there too.

Why not give it a try and import anyway? What can it hurt?

If you're concerned about losing the bookmarks you currently have you can back up your bookmarks. Open Firefox, under Bookmarks, choose Organize Bookmarks.
Once the bookmarks library is open, there is a little icon in the window that gives you the option to Backup, Export, etc. Use that to make a backup of your present bookmarks.

I have saved the document as an html file. Meanwhile a web page with the identical info still exists on the xmarks server, as I said. I tried highlighting multiple links on that page and dragging them into my favorites but apparently Firefox just isn't that smart because it wouldn't let me. it would only let me add them one at a time. Keep in mind, that's 51 pages of 12pt lines, one link per line, sorted with plain text section labels. It would be possible to fix this manually but it would take forever and a week. Meanwhile, how would I prevent this from happening again?

Jan2011 wrote:

Firefox 4 is a 27 MB file. If you're on dial-up, it may take a few hours. If you're on DSL, Cable, or FIOS, it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

Ok its saved as html but it's not just links. its got plain text in there too.

Why not give it a try and import anyway? What can it hurt?

If you're concerned about losing the bookmarks you currently have you can back up your bookmarks. Open Firefox, under Bookmarks, choose Organize Bookmarks.
Once the bookmarks library is open, there is a little icon in the window that gives you the option to Backup, Export, etc. Use that to make a backup of your present bookmarks.

I went to the bookmarks pulldown menu and saw nothing about organizing bookmarks there: at the top it said "book mark this page, subscribe to this page, bookmark all tabs, show all tabs" and below that was everything pertaining to specific bookmarks including most recent ones, unsorted ones, recent tags, things like that.

I went to the file menu for importing stuff and it only let me import things from safari - it did not allow me any other options.

I went into Finder (remember, I'm on a mac) and found my word document, saved as html, and told it to open in FF so it did so in a new window and it came up as a web page, which, I suppose, is to be expected.

side note: this all happened because my girlfriend wanted to get a turn on the computer to use Touchcopy to rip things off of her ipod. Touchcopy makes the whole machine run slower (its an I 7 processor with 8gigs of RAM) and the slowness crashed firefox. After she was done, i restarted FF and found the problem I started the thread about. I love her to bits but between her love of Bieber and her bad luck with my machine, sometimes I just want to tell her to stick an icecube in her nose or something. You know how it is. A l' amour!

Meanwhile I'm still having difficulty updating firefox. When FF gives me the alert for updating, and i tell it to do it, it just sits there downloading and never stops. I could leave it for days and it would still be "downloading". So what I've been doing is downloading it anew every time. I have no idea if this is complicating my system or what. Is it?

Thanks again. I'm going to go make ice cubes.

yeah - you seem to have two things going on here.
1) Updating Firefox
2) Importing your bookmarks.

On item 1)
Have you tried deleting the present Firefox application and then downloading it again using Safari?

On item 2)

I went to the file menu for importing stuff and it only let me import things from safari - it did not allow me any other options.

I have already mentioned that. I suggested that you use Safari to import the bookmarks from the Word-generated html file and then import into Firefox.

Jan2011 wrote:

yeah - you seem to have two things going on here.
1) Updating Firefox
2) Importing your bookmarks.

On item 1)
Have you tried deleting the present Firefox application and then downloading it again using Safari?

On item 2)

I went to the file menu for importing stuff and it only let me import things from safari - it did not allow me any other options.

I have already mentioned that. I suggested that you use Safari to import the bookmarks from the Word-generated html file and then import into Firefox.

Safari won't recognize the word file. I don't really understand how to make it work with Safari. Firefox's bookmarks thing always made more sense to me. I always have the sidebar open and just drag stuff into it.

If i delete the current version of FF, will that destroy what favorites I currently have?

The favorites are stored in Firefox's profile folder so you should be able to delete the Firefox application and keep you bookmarks. Just don't delete the Firefox Profile Folder which is in your User Library under Application Support.

Here's the info right from Mozilla
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_firefox

and http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/818689 says
"Your profile data is stored elsewhere in the Firefox Profile Folder, so you won't lose your bookmarks and other personal data."

As always, proceed with caution. A backup is good to have - just in case. I use Super Duper by ShirtPocket.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Since I last posted, a lot of silly things have been going on but I am finally able to readdress the problem. I did a system search for the bookmarks.html file and didn't find it in any system folder or whatever the Mac equivalent is. I did however find the .html file of it that I downloaded from the Xmarks site, which might have just been the saved data from that web page, though when I opened it in a FF tab, it was a list of all of my favorites from before the problem first started. Anyhow, I told FF to "import html" and it gave me the spinning beach ball for a minute and then said "done" and nothing had changed. Meanwhile, where else on my system would i find the old bookmark data?

What should I do from here on out?

See post 12. Firefox keeps Bookmarks (knows as Favorites in Internet Explorer) in Firefox's Profile folder.

hard drive \ Your User account \ Library \ Application Support \ Firefox \ Profiles

this is strange: when i click on the library, it says "you do not have permission to view this folder."

You might want to verify your permissions:

Open Disk Utility - it's probably in your Applications folder under Utilities.

When you open Disk Utility, your physical hard drive will be listed on the left and it will probably have the manufacturer's name included in the title. Under the physical hard drive, your logical drive will be listed. It's probably Macintosh HD or whatever you call your hard drive.

Click on that to hightlight it. Then near the bottom of the Disk Utility screen, click on Verify Disk Permissions. It may take 15 minutes or so.

Restart and try to open that folder again.

^I did that and rebooted and I still can't access the contents of the desired folders.

You mentioned that you're connected to a server. Can you tell me about that? Are you in some kind of business environment? If so, you may not be in an account that has full administrator privledges. This may be preventing you from doing certain things.

i said i was connected to a server? if i did i was confused. I have wifi in a private residence and this is my personal computer. Sorry about the mixup

Sorry, my mistake. After re-reading your initial post, I realized that you were referring to the BookMark Sych Service server.

Please go back to the Library folder and do a Get Info. Look to the bottom and see what the Ownership and Permissions are set to. It should be 'You can Read and Write. If not, then make the appropriate change.

=======================

To do a Get Info try either of these after highlighting the folder:
CMD-I
Right click and select Get Info
Control click and select Get Info

this just in: before you replied, i asked the computer to do a software update search and then updated and rebooted. Now FF is back to normal and so are the favorites. I am completely confused. Pleased but confused.

Meanwhile I cannot access the library folder no matter what I do. On Monday or Tuesday I will go harass the local Mac Store's Genius Bar and get that looked at. Then I will report back here. I want to know if this can happen again and more permanently. thank you for your patience.

Meanwhile I know for a fact that a problem like this would be even worse on a PC. So would fixing it be. but that's a topic for another thread. Thank you again for your patience and dedication! I'll be back soon.

... and thank you! In responding to your posts, I learned about BookMark's Sync Service. It was supposed to be shut down a few months ago because they weren't making any money, but it seems someone came in and bought it. I guess they have a premium service that provides the funds to keep it going.

I'd like to know that they say at the Apple store about your Library access priviledges.