Firefox ate my bookmarks, etc.

d00bid00b · 01-01-2006, 04:22 AM

Happy New Year all who recognise it.

I rebooted my Slackware box and - to my horror - discovered that Firefox-1.0.7 had eaten all of my bookmarks, my saved passwords, my homepage, and all related settings. I have no idea why this would happen ... I can't recall doing anything in particular with FF beforehand.
Anyway, does anybody have a clue how I might retrieve those or are they lost in the bowels of my machine?

Thanks

trickykid · 01-01-2006, 06:01 AM

Check your home directory for a .mozilla or .firefox folder, either they got wiped or someone deleted them but I highly doubt this was caused by a reboot or firefox itself.

d00bid00b · 01-01-2006, 06:10 AM

Thanks Tricky
There is such a directory, but the only bookmarks are the default barebones. I really cannot see how I would have wiped these out, and as I have been having no end of problems with Firefox crashing it seemed like the probable suspect in the "Case of the Missing Settings".

trickykid · 01-01-2006, 06:20 AM

Did you do anything prior to your home directory? I find it highly unlikely that firefox would wipe its own directory as I never had such problems myself or never heard of this. If that is the only directory you see for firefox and the bookmarks are the default one's, without a backup, your most likely starting over from scratch no matter.

d00bid00b · 01-01-2006, 06:29 AM

That would seem about the size of it - it seems really peculiar to me too that FF would commit "suicide" of a sort. The only thing that I did prior to rebooting was to empty out /tmp. I would find it very strange for FF to store its settings in /tmp however, and would have expected to see a .firefox directory in my /home.
Oh well - just curious if anyone else had ever had this problem before.

Thanks for your replies Tricky

J.W. · 01-01-2006, 10:38 AM

On a different note, if you plan to start from scratch anyway, you might consider upgrading to Firefox v1.5 rather than v1.0.7

Sepero · 01-01-2006, 10:54 AM

Perhaps it was a Power outage? Are you running an ext2 or reiser filesystem? If you are running ext2, the files might be in /lost+found

I read that you should use ext3 if you don't have a constant power supply.