A Bookmark Folder Has Disappeared

[mrivers]

My Bookmarks were very overgrown and I started finding lots of duplicates and dead links, so it was time for some Spring cleaning on this snowy day. I spent some time checking all the links, deleted the dead or useless ones and the duplicates, and then re-arranged some things, including creating a couple of sub-folders under one of the existing folders, and splitting out some of the bookmarks to the sub-folders. Everything was working fine until I dragged this folder to a new position on the Bookmarks list, and it disappeared. This folder contained many of my most often used bookmarks and would be a pain to reconstruct.

The last backup was before the clean-up and reorganization, but everything is there. I can use this and take the time to re-arrange it, but I would like to do some more investigating first.

I exported the re-arranged version with the missing folder as both a .JSON and .HTML file. The .JSON was too clumsy to read with a text editor (is there something other than Firefox that can read it in a formatted fashion?), however, when I opened the exported Bookmarks.HTML in Firefox, my missing folder with its subfolders and links were all there and correct. When I imported that file into the Firefox bookmarks, the missing folder was still missing. I think it might be there, but just not displaying properly. Could it be hidden behind something? I tried importing the HTML file to Firefox on another computer, and the missing folder was still missing.

I can re-construct my missing folder from the text of the HTML file, but I wonder if there's something else that I can try that would be less time-consuming. I know that your first, or maybe second question will be. I'd post the file for inspection, but there are some . . er . . . sensitive links in there and I wouldn't want to be blackmailed or embarrassed.

I'm working on Firefox 60.3.0esr

[jscher2000]

It could be inside an unexpected folder.

If you load one of the bookmarked sites, you may be able to discover its folder using the Edit dialog. Click the blue star icon in the address bar, then expand the folder list (button similar to v) and scroll down to find the highlight to discover the location of the folder.

Or if that doesn't work, you could convert your JSON file using my tool here, and the HTML Export will have folders indented and possibly a little easier to read:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html

[mrivers]

Thanks for the tips. I found some more strange things. Your HTML converter gave me the same data as using Firefox's Export to HTML function, though a bit nicer format, but nothing that's been missing showed up there.

Tried your suggestion to use the Edit dialog on a bookmark. First one I tried (that was in the Bookmarks folder) didn't have the star filled in blue, suggesting that it wasn't bookmarked. I tried another that did, and the Edit suggested that it was in the Other Bookmarks folder. I went back to the standard Bookmarks list, went to the Other Bookmarks folder, and the lost folder (it's named Forums) was there. In fact there were two Forums folders there, one that was pretty much the original unorganized one, and the other having the new sub-folders in it that I had created in organizing the Forums folder. Things were kind of scrambled, but most are there. I think that what happened was that when I imported the HTML file into the bookmarks, it didn't replace the original bookmarks, but rather, tacked these on, but not entirely all together.

In older versions of Firefox, I was able to have more than one set of bookmarks and switch between them. It wasn't as simple as it could have been, I think I might have had to go into the Config menu and pick the one I wanted to use, but I can't find my way there any more.

Is there a way to delete the currently active Bookmarks and start over by importing the HTML closest copy? Is that a sensible approach?

[LIMPET235]

Hi,
This extension may come in handy for locating your Bookmarks.
It's similar to what "Show Parent" & "Go Parent" used to do, just a bit differently.
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search
This one finds & removes any duplicates...
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search

The KB articles on Bookmarks & the difference between HTML & .json backups/transfers.
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bookmarks
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_bookmarks

[mrivers]

I apologize for being stupid here (I'm really computer-literate, but just a Firefox user), but LIMPET235's post reminded me of the Profile Manger, which I remember using years and years ago. It shows me one profile (default), but how do I find out what's in it, and, hopefully edit it to point to a more reasonable bookmark file, or start from a profile with no bookmarks so I can import one of the workable bookmark files into it.

I tried that Search 2 add-on and the Cleanup add-on. The results from the Cleanup are interesting. Just about every link shows up as two or more entries. Most of them show up twice, in the same folder. I suspect that there may be two copies of the folder in the Bookmarks file (I know for sure this is the case for at least some - I've seen them. And some are in multiple folders, which was intentional as a hedge against looking in the wrong folder and not finding the link. I think that what I need to do to get a handle on this is to go through the Bookmarks list and note all of the folders with the same name, and check their contents. I've done that some and find different links (and some of the same) in each folder of the same name.

Is the "merge duplicate folders" function safe? I did make a backup so I can recover if it does something that I don't want. But perhaps it would be good to run that merge first, see what it does, and then delete duplicates from the merged folders. Make sense?

[later] I tried "Merge Duplicate Folders] and I don't see anything happening - no changes and nothing marked after about 15 minutes. I have nothing slected in the "Excluded folders" list in the Settings. How is this supposed to work?

[jscher2000]

Is there a way to delete the currently active Bookmarks and start over by importing the HTML closest copy? Is that a sensible approach?

If you like, you can delete the bookmarks by selecting and pressing Delete in the Library window where you've been organizing.

Or you can wipe the current set by reloading a recent day's automatic backup, see: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/restore- ... -move-them

I don't know which method will give you the best results.