What to Do if Firefox Lost Your Bookmarks

Illustration of Firefox bookmarks being abducted by an alien spaceship

Firefox lost my bookmarks!

We know it’s stressful to lose all of your important work at once. But it’s important to keep a cool head and move quickly if you want to recover your missing or deleted Firefox bookmarks. We’ll show you how to get your bookmarks back.

Keep in mind
Your bookmarks might be missing because the Firefox bookmarks toolbar was accidentally turned off. Follow these directions to check if that's the case →

1. Find a device ASAP that's not connected to the internet

This step is time sensitive, so try it right away. If you have a device that wasn’t connected to the internet at the time your bookmarks were lost, grab it. Immediately turn off Wi-Fi so it can’t connect to the internet.

With the internet turned off, you can either:

Manually copy and paste your Firefox bookmarks into a text document. This method works best if your bookmarks are in folders, because you can simply copy the folder to grab all of the links that are organized within.

OR

Download your bookmarks as an HTML file (the internet should still be off):

  1. Open Firefox and click the Open Menu button (in the top-right with three horizontal lines). Select Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks.
  2. Click the Import/export button and select Export bookmarks to HTML.
  3. Save the file to a safe location.

Close all of your other Firefox sessions. Now you can turn the internet back on. Come back here and click Import bookmarks. This should recover your Firefox bookmarks and put everything back to normal.

2. Find the Firefox bookmark file on your computer

If Step 1 doesn’t work, you can likely still recover bookmarks from a file on your computer.

  1. Follow these instructions for finding your Firefox profile folder.
  2. In places.sqlite, you’ll find the bookmarkbackups folder.
  3. Copy the most recent backup file (prior to losing your bookmarks), and save it to a safe place.
  4. Go back to Open Menu button > Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > Import/export button > Import bookmarks from HTML.
  5. Upload the file and your bookmarks should reappear, good as new.

Alternatively, if you have a Mac you can use Time Machine to restore the files. Follow the detailed instructions here →

3. Get Workona so this doesn’t happen again

Workona automatically saves all of your work in the browser, including bookmarks, open tabs, and entire browsing sessions. Add it to Firefox so you never have to worry about lost bookmarks again.

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