Backup & Restore bookmarks in Firefox

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Did you know you can backup, restore bookmarks or even import it onto another system? I didn’t until today when I was looking for a way to export the bookmarks to my new PC. By default, Firefox maintains last 5 days backup copies of your Bookmarks.

There are 2 ways one can do it, the quick and dirty copy/paste of the bookmark file or by using the “Bookmarks – Organize Bookmarks” menu.

Quick & Dirty

There is a file called Bookmarks.html under your Firefox profile directory. Simply copy the file as a backup or if you want to update the bookmarks elsewhere on a different PC, simply copy this file over to the Firefox profile directory on that machine and that’s it. The daily bookmark backups are under “bookmarkbackups” under the profile directory. The file format is bookmarks-<year>-<month>-<date>.json. For example, a backup from 29th July 2009 would be bookmarks-2009-07-29.json

The Firefox Profile directory is under

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<RANDOM NAME>

To access the profiles directory,

Click Start – Run and type “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\“. Under this directory, there will a directory name of some random letters (if there are more than one Firefox profile then multiple directories would be found). Open this directories to find the bookmarks.html file or your bookmarks backup.

From Bookmarks menu

Click “Bookmarks – Organize Bookmarks” menu and click “Import and Backup“. Here you can create a new backup or restore from a previous backup or a HTML file. You can use the .json files to import on any other machine as well to import into that systems Firefox bookmarks.