How to recover lost Firefox bookmarks? Where is my Firefox bookmarks folder?

IE records all bookmarks or favorite web shortcuts in a folder named Favorites, but where does Firefox store all the bookmarks?

Below are a list of very probable locations where Firefox would save your bookmarks by the OS you are using.

  1. Windows 95 (without Desktop Update)
    C:/Windows/Mozilla
  2. Windows 95 (with Desktop Update)/98/Me
    C:/Windows/Application Data/Mozilla
    C:/Windows/Profiles/<Windows login or user name>/Application Data/Mozilla
  3. Windows NT 4.x
    C:/Winnt/Profiles/<Windows login or user name>/Application Data/Mozilla
  4. Windows 2000 and XP
    C:/Documents and Settings/<Windows login or user name>/Application Data/Mozilla
  5. Windows Vista
    C:/Users/<Windows login or user name>/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla
  6. Unix
    ~/.mozilla/
  7. Mac OS X
    ~/Library/Mozilla/
    ~/Library/Application Support/

With Windows systems, make sure you have selected to display all hidden files or some of the folders such as “Application Data” may not show themselves by default. Also you should replace the “<Windows login or user name>” part to your own login name, which in most cases would be “Administrator”.

Take Windows XP + Firefox 2.0.0.20 / Firefox 3.5 for example, my Firefox stores the current bookmarks in the file:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\gsbmusic.default\bookmarks.html

If you have mistakenly deleted a bookmark or all of them, don’t panic. Firefox backs things up pretty well and you can find historical bookmarks backups in this folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\gsbmusic.default\bookmarkbackups

Files in this folder are backups of Firefox bookmarks in the past few days. They are text files in JSON format, hard to read manually but you sure can rescue and recover your lost bookmarks in there, just search “http://” using a text editor.

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