News (January 2010)
All of the extensions on this site have been successfully tested on Firefox 3.6. If you find any compatibility issues please e-mail me with the full details of the problem.
If Firefox lists an extension as incompatible then please reinstall it using the links on this page.
Bookmark Backup
Version 0.4.11
Install
Install Bookmark Backup 0.4.11
Description
Bookmark Backup is a simple extension that helps to keep your bookmarks (and optionally other Firefox settings) safe. Each time Firefox is closed, a copy of your bookmarks file will be made to a backup location. If Firefox's bookmarks become corrupted or lost, find the most recent uncorrupted backup and copy it into your profile folder. By default the backups can be found in the Backups folder inside Firefox's profile folder, though this location can be changed in Bookmark Backup's Options dialog.
Additionally, thanks to code contributed by Nickolay Ponomarev, other files may also be backed up along with the bookmarks file. You can specify which files to backup in the Options dialog. Just check the box for each type of setting you want backed up, any other files can be listed in the following text box separated by a | character. Please refer to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base for details about what data is stored in each file.
Please remember, this extension should be used in addition to a regular profile backup not as a replacement.
Note: Firefox 1.5 (and later) makes its own backup of your bookmarks, therefore this extension is only useful if you want to backup other settings or to control where the backups are stored.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Why is the backed up copy of bookmarks.html an old file?
Firefox 3 and later now store their bookmarks in a file called places.sqlite, the bookmarks.html file is no longer used. You can confirm this by checking the last modified date of the original bookmarks.html file in your profile.
2. I have lost my bookmarks, how do I restore the backup?
- Close Firefox.
- Find the Backups folder in your profile folder (or in your custom backup location, if configured).
- Go into the sub-folder from yesterday (don't use today's backup, it will be corrupted). Copy whichever files you wish to restore into your profile folder.
- Restart Firefox.
If you use Windows and don't know how to perform any of these steps please feel free to e-mail me and I'll try to walk you through them.
3. Does this extension work on Mac OS?
Maybe, some people say it does, other say it doesn't. I don't own a Mac so I can't confirm one way or the other.
4. Why is there a bookmarkbackups folder in my profile? How do I disable it?
The bookmarkbackups folder is created by Firefox itself (this feature was added in Firefox 1.5). The two sets of backups should not conflict, however if you wish to disable the built-in backup you can do so by setting browser.bookmarks.max_backups to 0 (this requires Firefox 2 or later).
5. Will you add support for, timestamped backups, more than 7 days of backups, less than 7 days of backups, scheduled backups, weekly instead of daily backups, or backing up files outside the profile?
At the moment I have no plans for any of those features.
6. Can I use wildcards in the other files box?
To a limited extent yes, you can backup a whole folder simply by typing it's name (e.g. Cache). You can backup a set of files with the same extension by typing *.extension (e.g. *.rdf), using the * operator in any other position will not work.
7. Can I use paths in the other files box?
Bookmark Backup supports primitive relative paths, use a forward slash (/) as the path separator. There's currently no way to backup files outside the profile folder.
Contributors
- Nickolay Ponomarev (Multiple file backup code)
- Thomas Bertels (Icon and French translation)
- Patrick Ruh (German translation, retired)
- Carlos of Proyecto Nave (Spanish translation)
- Willy Young (Traditional Chinese translation)
- Giovanni Francesco Solone of eXtenZilla.it (Italian translation)
- Orçun Apaydýn (Turkish translation)
- Petr Jirsa (Czech translation)
- Sampan Sittiwantana (Thai translation)
- Premier (Japanese translation)
- SlovakSoft (Slovak translation)
- bigbigbomb (Simplified Chinese translation)
- Toni Hermoso Pulido (Catalan translation)
- KAMI (Hungarian translation)
- Pedro Failla (Brazilian Portuguese translation)
- Junyeob Kim of Mozilla Update Korea (Korean translation)
- Team erweiterungen.de (German translation)
Release History
0.4.11
- Added support for the latest Firefox 4 nightlies (2010-07-02 and above).
0.4.10
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2008-08-18 and above).
0.4.9
- Added support for Firefox 3 final.
0.4.8
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2008-03-14 and above).
0.4.7
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2007-12-06 and above).
0.4.6
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2007-06-21 and above).
0.4.5
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2007-06-18 and above). Thanks Tony E.
0.4.4
- Updated the list of backed up files for current trunk builds (2007-05-22 and above).
0.4.3
- Updated the list of backed up files for Firefox 2.0.0.2 and current trunk builds (thanks Alan Baxter and Tony E).
0.4.2
- Added support for Firefox 2 final. Due to my lateness in getting the file to the translators not all locales are ready yet, if your locale is missing please check back later, I'll update the extension and this post as locales come in. The following locales are included at the time of writing (2006-12-01): ca, cs-CZ, de-DE, en-US, es-ES, fr-FR, hu-HU, it-IT, ja, ko-KR, sk, th-TH, zh-CN, zh-TW.
- Added a Korean (ko-KR) locale, contributed by Junyeob Kim of Mozilla Update Korea.
0.4.1
- Fixed a potential backup failure when the bookmarks file can't be found.
- Added a Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) locale, contributed by Pedro Failla.
0.4
- Partially rewritten to make the extension more reliable, additionally it now performs backups both at shutdown and every 2 hours. The backup interval can be tweaked by setting the bookmarkbackup.interval pref to a value in minutes, you can also enable/disable startup/shutdown backups with the bookmarkbackup.startupBackup and bookmarkbackup.shutdownBackup prefs.
- Added a logging mode to help track down backup problems. To enable it set the pref bookmarkbackup.loggingEnabled to true, this will create a file named
bookmarkbackup.login your profile folder. - Added an icon, contributed by Thomas Bertels.
- This extension no longer works on older versions of Firefox, you must be using Firefox 1.5 or above.
- Added a Catalan (ca-AD) locale, contributed by Toni Hermoso Pulido.
- Added a Hungarian (hu-HU) locale, contributed by KAMI.
0.3.3
- Changed the passwords checkbox in the Options dialog to also backup pre-Firebird 0.7 style password files (e.g. 1234567.s) since people with old profiles may still be using that style of file.
- Added an Italian (it-IT) locale, contributed by Giovanni Francesco Solone of eXtenZilla.it.
- Added a Turkish (tr-TR) locale, contributed by Orçun Apaydýn.
- Added a French (fr-FR) locale, contributed by Thomas Bertels.
- Added a Czech (cs-CZ) locale, contributed by Petr Jirsa.
- Added a Thai (th-TH) locale, contributed by Sampan Sittiwantana.
- Added a Japanese (ja-JP) locale, contributed by Premier.
- Added a Slovak (sk-SK) locale, contributed by SlovakSoft.
- Added a Simplified Chinese (zh-CN) locale, contributed by bigbigbomb.
0.3.2
- Fixed an issue with backing up whole folders (e.g. Cache) from the profile folder.
- Added a Traditional Chinese (zh-TW) locale, contributed by Willy Young.
0.3.1
- The most common settings now have a checkbox in the Options dialog to make it easier to specify the files to be backed up.
- Each day's backups are now copied into a sub-folder of the Backups folder, this keeps the files for each day together and resolves the problem of files getting the wrong extension.
- Added a German (de-DE) locale, contributed by Patrick Ruh.
- Added a Spanish (es-ES) locale, contributed by Carlos of Proyecto Nave.
- Removed the automatic
install.rdfupdate link due to bandwidth constraints, from now on you'll have to manually check for updates.
0.3
- Bookmark Backup can now optionally backup other files in your profile. Simply go to the Options dialog and enter a list of extra files to be backed up (separated with the
|character). Code contributed by Nickolay Ponomarev (thanks Nick).
0.2.1
- Fixed some previously unlocalisable strings.
0.2
- The backup location can now be specified in Bookmark Backup's Options window.
- Fixed the Linux permissions issue when creating the Backups directory.
0.1.2
- Now supports the backup of a bookmarks file that has been moved with browser.bookmarks.file.
0.1.1
- Bookmark backups are now stored in a sub-directory of the profile directory named
Backups.
0.1
- Initial Release.
Comments
< Previous page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | Next page >
Pike:
Shush. :P
It just takes editing bookmarkbackup.properties to have it use different directory names, right?
@Werner
Thanks for the help. I guess this will teach me to test updated locales before uploading them. :)
@Matt
That's correct.
Or you could add a (hidden) setting to number them, and number them based on the name in bookmarkbackup.properties + 1. That should usually work. Might also have to have the locale set which one begins teh week...
(This is something that would be fun to do myself, but as I've said before, I don't know JavaScript, and I'm busy working on a PHP script at the moment.)
As soon as I installed that Test Build 7 on Firefox 1.5 and my computer crashed and reset, and when I restarted Firefox all my Extensions and Search Plugins were gone! AND NOW FIREFOX ISN'T LETTING ME INSTALL THEM AGAIN. I tried uninstalling Firefox and re-installing it but that didn't work.
Any more bright ideas...?
Okay, I deleted the Profile Folder too (Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox), and it seems I can install itself again. Hooray?
Other weird problems:
- I wasn't able to add bookmarks either
- The bookmark toolbar (View > Toolbar) would always come back even after I closed it
And, er, I was using WinXP.
"Any more bright ideas...?"
I'm sorry but that comment is unfair. A few points:
a) In XP only the kernel or kernel level code can cause BSODs (and thus reboot your machine).
b) Firefox runs in user mode not in kernel mode.
c) BB doesn't have any natively executable code.
d) No code supplied by BB is run during extension installation, none what so ever.
e) Even if points a-d didn't exist, BB 0.4 is clearly marked as use-at-your-own-risk beta code.
Just wanted to say thanks for the great extension. It's saved my butt several times and will continue to do so. I look forward to the 0.4 stable release.
Thanks for the work and your contribution to the Firefox community.
Michael
PS- I was reading some of the comments and thought that you've been getting enough grief and could use some praise!
Michael:
Aside from the automatically deleting the target backup directory, it's all well tested. None of the test builds have caused me any problems in months of use.
@Michael
Thanks.
@Matt
That reminds me, I guess I need to actually release 0.4 at some point. :-)
Ah, test builds are more fun. :P
But yeah, you did say you'd release it when Firefox 1.5 (or was it 1.1 at the time? :P ) came out.
It's definitely safe to release, I've been using it for months without problems. Still haven't tested the deleting, though. Might want to put a warning on doing that.
@Matt
I've still not heard back from a couple of translators, I suppose I could just go ahead without them. I was also thinking of adding a checkbox for Search Plugins now that they're stored in the profile, but adding that should be safe enough to not require a new test build.
I installed Test Build 7 on Trunk, Branch and Release, none of them choked on it (of course, there have been no checkins on Branch so it's identical to the Release). It's been a few days, and I have yet to test the new pref. Guess I'd better get on that, I did ask for it, after all. It sounds like the time for testing is nearly up.
Ok, I tried it, my hard drive wasn't erased or melted. Some unneeded bookmarks I deleted for the test were deleted from the day's backup after I closed Fx. Seems to work fine, job well done (as usual). Release this puppy, already!
Oh, right, those weird people who don't speak English. (Kidding!)
Well, I dunno. If the translators aren't getting back to you, you shouldn't just wait forever for them. You can release it without some of the localizations, and still keep 0.3.3 around for the people that need it. Maybe you should ask the BabelZilla folks for help updating them?
Unrelated, but why aren't your extensions on Mozilla Update (well, Bookmark Backup and Popup Count, at least, I haven't checked any others)?
@greenknight
Thanks for the testing.
@Matt
Getting listed on UMO is too much hard work and will only generate more support e-mails so I don't bother.
Pike:
I dunno about the hard work of getting listed since I've never tried myself, but it would generate more support emails. So okay.
I've just started to prefer to link to UMO (should be AMO or MU), because it should be encouraged over just going to random websites for extensions. Not that I ever say that, but I prefer silently pointing to it. I don't really mind linking here, though. :)
Does 0.3.3 work on Firefox 1.5?
@Guido
As far as I know it should (I haven't had any reports of problems).
< Previous page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | Next page >
@Pike
The problem is fixed nox, thx for the excellent service.