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Trouble restoring firefox from backup

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Hi,

After losing my session history and bookmarks from using firefox's "forget last 5 minutes" feature on accident, I used shadowcopyview to create a backup of my old profile. Now, after two reinstalls, I still cannot recover my session or bookmarks, even when replacing the old profile entirely.

JeffersonCher's wonderful scrounger has helped me to recover from a similiar blunder in the past, but this time, attempting to recover the session from a recovery file gave me 3 websites I haven't visited in 2 years and an error message when attempting to recover the bookmarks.

Anything you can provide would be a big help: I am very confused on how to really proceed.

Thanks!

Hi, After losing my session history and bookmarks from using firefox's "forget last 5 minutes" feature on accident, I used shadowcopyview to create a backup of my old profile. Now, after two reinstalls, I still cannot recover my session or bookmarks, even when replacing the old profile entirely. [https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html JeffersonCher's] wonderful scrounger has helped me to recover from a similiar blunder in the past, but this time, attempting to recover the session from a recovery file gave me 3 websites I haven't visited in 2 years and an error message when attempting to recover the bookmarks. Anything you can provide would be a big help: I am very confused on how to really proceed. Thanks!
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Hi, sorry to hear about this problem.

Bookmark Restore

This failure can be caused by a file lock on places.sqlite, or a permissions/privileges issue. A Windows restart may help with that.

If restarting doesn't help, could you let us know what you get when you run the "Verify Integrity" function. That's here:

Open Firefox's Troubleshooting Information page using any of these methods:

  • "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

Near the bottom, there is a section titled Places Database -- that's the file which stores history and bookmarks. Click the button labeled Verify Integrity. There may be a 10-15 second delay before results appear.

If all is well, the report that appears below the button should start with:

> Task: checkIntegrity
+ The places.sqlite database is sane
+ The favicons.sqlite database is sane

Does yours say that, or something else? You can select and copy the report, and then paste it into a reply for review and comment.

Session History

It's weird that the file is intact but contains so few tabs. If you look in the box with the raw JSON data, are there other sites listed there? You can use Find and look for HTTPS, for example. If there are URLs the script didn't extract, you can save the .json file and try to extract them another way.

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The first few lines of the integrity report seem fine, but the scrounger is a lot weirder: a few dozen lines down, all the characters become some sort of unicode symbol I'm unfamiliar with. The three windows it did recover seem to be the ones in the oldest tabs I still had open. I've attached images of what the scrounger recovered and the integrity log below. > Task: checkIntegrity + The places.sqlite database is sane + The favicons.sqlite database is sane > Task: invalidateCaches + The caches have been invalidated > Task: checkCoherence + The database is coherent > Task: expire + Database cleaned up > Task: originFrecencyStats + Recalculated origin frecency stats > Task: vacuum + Initial database size is 5120KiB + The database has been vacuumed + Final database size is 5120KiB > Task: stats + Places.sqlite size is 5120KiB + Favicons.sqlite size is 5120KiB + pragma_user_version is 54 + pragma_page_size is 32768 + pragma_cache_size is -2048 + pragma_journal_mode is wal + pragma_synchronous is 1 + History can store a maximum of 112348 unique pages + Table moz_origins has 28 records + Table moz_places has 103 records + Table moz_historyvisits has 118 records + Table moz_inputhistory has 0 records + Table moz_bookmarks has 6 records + Table moz_bookmarks_deleted has 0 records + Table moz_keywords has 0 records + Table sqlite_sequence has 0 records + Table moz_anno_attributes has 0 records + Table moz_annos has 0 records + Table moz_items_annos has 0 records + Table moz_meta has 3 records + Table sqlite_stat1 has 15 records + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_origins_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_inputhistory_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_bookmarks_deleted_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_keywords_1 + Index sqlite_autoindex_moz_anno_attributes_1 + Index moz_places_url_hashindex + Index moz_places_hostindex + Index moz_places_visitcount + Index moz_places_frecencyindex + Index moz_places_lastvisitdateindex + Index moz_places_guid_uniqueindex + Index moz_places_originidindex + Index moz_historyvisits_placedateindex + Index moz_historyvisits_fromindex + Index moz_historyvisits_dateindex + Index moz_bookmarks_itemindex + Index moz_bookmarks_parentindex + Index moz_bookmarks_itemlastmodifiedindex + Index moz_bookmarks_dateaddedindex + Index moz_bookmarks_guid_uniqueindex + Index moz_keywords_placepostdata_uniqueindex + Index moz_annos_placeattributeindex + Index moz_items_annos_itemattributeindex > Task: _refreshUI

Again, thank you for the help!

Edit: I have tried restarting as well, but that doesn't seem to solve the issue.

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What you see in the third screenshot are null bytes (0x00), so that file is corrupted and incomplete and you can't use it to restore a session. This can possibly happen with you use undelete software to recover a lost/deleted file and clusters have been reused in the meantime.

Is that the only file you have ?

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Yes, all the other backups are from shadowcopyview on the day of.

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With the files that don't look like 0000 0000 etc., could you try the other button, where it says:

Fallback: Unstructured URL list

Maybe that will pull out more URLs.

Or maybe I need to update the Scrounger due to a recent change in Firefox?


Regarding bookmarks, the database sounds healthy but basically empty. You've tried using Restore with one of the files you recover from bookmarkbackups? What happens?

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jscher2000 said

With the files that don't look like 0000 0000 etc., could you try the other button, where it says: Fallback: Unstructured URL list Maybe that will pull out more URLs. Or maybe I need to update the Scrounger due to a recent change in Firefox?

Regarding bookmarks, the database sounds healthy but basically empty. You've tried using Restore with one of the files you recover from bookmarkbackups? What happens?

Sadly, it's still the same three urls. As for the bookmark backups, it worked! Using an older file in the bookmarkbackup folder did the trick, but the sesisonstore file seems to be done for.