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 >
@mom2larry
The extension will automatically make a backup of your bookmarks in a Backups sub-folder of your profile folder. If you lose your bookmarks again, go into your profile then copy the backup from the backups sub-folder into your main profile folder.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile
As for getting your bookmarks back, if you can find a file in your profile (such as bookmarks.bak, bookmarks.moztmp, etc.) then you can rename it to bookmarks.html, if not you're probably out of luck. You could try file undeletion software but that is unlikely to work if you've used your computer since you lost the bookmarks.
@Jay
If you managed to get the file bookmarkbackup.xpi onto your hard drive you should be able to drag it onto a Firefox window to get it to install. If not can you give more details please?
thanks so much for this extension. i love firefox, but without this extension i'd have stopped using it by now, as my bookmarks seem to get zapped on a regular basis. you've taken the pain out of that.
keep it up!
Holy fox of fire, I love you man!
Firefox suddenly reset itself, and I paniced and started browsing my Application Data-folder. Then I saw Backups, copied it, and everything was back to normal.
God bless you.
I installed your extension yesterday after loosing all of my bookmarks the day before, and it did make a Thursday folder and create backups of the files. However today I've closed and opened Firefox several times and no Friday folder, and the files in the Thursday folder are still dated for yesterday. Has anyone else experienced the issue with it unexpectedly stops working?
Windows XPPro SP2
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Bookmark Backup 0.3.3
I had to use Bookmarks Backups for first time today, and found that the most recent day, yesterday, Monday 23rd May, had not been properly backed up. I've had to use Sunday instead. (Annoying, as I added a lot of bookmarks yesterday.)
Assuming it's just me, anyone understand what may be happening here please? I've shown a detailed comparison of Sunday and Monday below. I could understand if say one particular Monday got screwed up somehow, due to a Win XP glitch or whatever, but as you see I don't have *any* recent Monday. Even the files shown are a hotch potch of dates about a month old!
\Bookmark Backups\Monday
----------------------------------
chrome (FOLDER) 25/04/2005 08:41
bookmarks.html 24/04/2005 18:05
cert8.db 23/04/2005 12:33
cookies.txt 24/04/2005 18:19
downloads.rdf 24/04/2005 16:26
formhistory.dat 23/04/2005 12:33
history.dat 23/04/2005 12:33
hostperm.1 21/03/2005 11:39
key3.db 23/04/2005 12:33
localstore.rdf 24/04/2005 19:09
mimeTypes.rdf 06/04/2005 16:19
prefs.js 25/04/2005 08:41
secmod.db 18/03/2005 09:38
sign ons.txt 24/04/2005 17:23
- A month old! (Should be 23/05/2005)
- Mixture of dates (23, 24, 25 etc)
- Why not Mon 16/05, or 9/05, or 2/05?
\Bookmark Backups\Sunday
----------------------------------
chrome (FOLDER) 22/05/2005 23:36
bookmarks.html 22/05/2005 23:31
cert8.db 22/05/2005 23:31
cookies.txt 22/05/2005 23:35
dow loads.rdf 22/05/2005 23:31
formhistory.dat 22/05/2005 23:31
history.dat 22/05/2005 23:36
hostperm.1 22/05/2005 19:25
key3.db 22/05/2005 23:31
localstore.rdf 22/05/2005 23:33
mimeTypes.rdf 22/05/2005 18:21
prefs.js 22/05/2005 23:36
secmod.db 18/03/2005 09:38
sign ons.txt 11/05/2005 14:55
- All looks correct
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
I'm even more confused now. This morning (Wed)I have subfoders for Tues and Wed, with files of various dates in them. But where are the previous subfolders, for Mon, Sun, Sat, Fri and Thu?
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
@terrypin
Did you get my PM over at MozillaZine forums?
re: #84
The field in Options doesn't support paths (other than very primitive relative paths).
Does this exclude the ability to save my RIPs, and GreaseMonkey scripts?
It didn't retain these Others:
extensions\{1dbc4a33-ea62-4330-966c-7bdad3455322}\store\config.xml
|extensions\{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}\chrome\greasemonkey\content\scripts\config.xml
for the sake of brevity I'll not list all the GM scripts.
Additionally is there/could there be a wildcard feature to pickup all the files in a given subdirectory? to ease backing up GreaseMonkey user scripts?
thanks for the must-have extension!
When will you have a version available for Firefox v1.04?
Thanks
russwinkler@gmail.com
Re #128
Pike: Sorry for delay in replying to your PM - away for a few days.
Didn't realise until later (and your reply confirmed it), that the backups only take place on closing FF. I don't often do that! My PC, and FF are typically on for days or weeks. I'll now try to make a habit of closing and re-opening daily. Anyway, I see it's your intention to add a scheduled option, and that would be much better for me.
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
Found out about your extension yesterday after experiencing my first loss of bookmarks. WinXP system, NTFS, FF running in the background, printing with Word97 in the foreground. My printer is old, and the XP driver is flaky. Causes the PC to reboot occasionally when trying to print. Never lost bookmarks before despite FF being open in other instances. This time I lost them. It was not an issue of a new profile. They were lost.
I did recover most all of them by booting into my Linux partition, and doing the following command as root:
cat /dev/hda2 | strings | grep -A 700 "DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file" > bookmks.html
I used the -A 700 to capture 700 lines after the hit. That ended up being quite a bit more than I needed, but I wanted to be sure. Amounted to a bit of extra post editing. If you only have a few hundred bookmarks, you could go with 500.
With my C: drive being hda2 of course. It recovered a bunch of bookmarks.html files into one. I then parsed them out into individual files (manually cut/pasted them to new files) and found the one that appeared to be the most recent. I was back in business in about 30-45 minutes. My C: drive is a 15 gig partition, and it scanned in under 10 minutes.
But thanks to your extension, I won't have to do that again. But posting it here for those who have lost it and are comfortable enough with Linux to do this. If you don't have Linux on your system, use a live boot CD. You will have greater chances of recovery if you minimize activity on the drive after the loss.
@GeeK canon
The path feature is very simple since it's only really designed for internal use (to backup the chrome\user*.css files). You *must* use a single forward slash / as the path separator and the only wildcard available is for file extensions (e.g. *.something or *.bat). However you don't need a wildcard to backup a directory, if you add a directory BB will backup the entire contents.
So you need to use something like this:
extensions/{1dbc4a33-ea62-4330-966c-7bdad3455322}/store/config.xml
|extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}/chrome/greasemonkey/content/scripts
@Russ
The version on this page works for me in Fx 1.04.
@jboucher
Thanks for the tip!
I installed the extension sometime ago but did not bother checking whether it was working properly or not. Today, when I needed the backup (after my FF profile was somehow corrupted and all bookmarks appear to be lost, of course), I found that the newest backup files were over 3 weeks old. I tested the extension and found that even after FF is closed and the PC re-started, no current bookmarks are backed up.
I'm using Win XP and the backup files are being stored in a custom location (i.e. not the default).
Is there something that I am doing wrong or does this extension really not work as advertised?
I just checked mine, and they are up to date. Granted some of the date/time stamps in Saturday's folder (today being Sunday) do date some time back because that's the last time they changed. If you are relying the modified date being reported back by Windows to determine if the backup was recent or not, that is deceiving. Because if your bookmarks did not change for several weeks, then although they get backed up daily, the date displayed will be a few weeks old. To be able to better see if it is working properly, view the folders (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc) in Detail view to see the last modified date on them. Mine show proper consecutive dates on them. Which confirms that the program is backing up daily. This is because the content of the folder is modified each time the program backs up again, even if the actual content of the folder didn't change. Because unless I am wrong, the program does not check to see if the content has changed or not. It simply rotates on a 7 day cycle. So it will update the daily folders regardless if the content changed or not. So they will properly reflect that the program is indeed backing up daily.
@Sitara
One weakness of BB 0.3.x is that it makes backups at browser shutdown, if you leave Fx open permanently or turn off your PC by cutting power it won't make a backup. The forthcoming BB 0.4 will work around this limitation.
Another alternative is that you've hit the 'bug' in Fx 1.0.x that causes extensions to be disabled but still show as enabled in the extension manager. You may want to try disabling BB, restarting Firefox, re-enabling BB, restarting Firefox again, then re-testing.
If it still doesn't work then can I have some more details please:
- does it create the Backups folder?
- does it create the day-of-the-week folder?
- will it backup files other than bookmarks?
- is there anything unusual about the location you're trying to backup to?
- what version of Fx do you have installed?
- what other extensions do you have installed?
Sorry for any dataloss you experienced, I hadn't had any complaints for months and now yours is the fourth in as many weeks so I'm not sure what is happening. :-(
Thanks for your helpful comments. I normally do exit FF properly, so there could not have been any unnatural shut-down that you alluded to.
I uninstalled BB and then re-installed it. Right now, the first day (Friday) folder does contain a new back-up file - so far, so good! I will wait for a few more days and see whether the back up works fine for subsequent days. If it does, then the problem is obviously solved.
Thanks again for your help.
how do you overwrite your faviores lets say im reading a fanfic but but i dont want to take too much space for on my bookmark reading chapters.
Hello..Thanks for the great work on BB. I have also experienced a similar prolem with BB not making a backup on shutown. It seems that, at least in Windows ME, the total number of backup folders is limited to 7. So if I delete the six oldest backup folders, it will continue to save the current day's as well as 5 newer ones.
@stephen
As far as I know you can't, you could try searching for an extension that allows it.
@JWT
The number of backups is limited to 7 by design, deleting older folders won't have any effect on how many backups are made. If you're saying the bookmarks file is not being updated then (as noted earlier) please verify by content not by timestamp, e.g. add a bookmark, close firefox, then search the bookmarks.html file from today's backup to see if it is there. Please comment back with the results of your test, thanks.
< 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 >
Tried to download this AM experienced difficulty with the download? Am unsure of the nature of the problem.