An HTML backup doesn't include tags (does include descriptions), so if you need to preserve tag and descriptions (only the latter have been removed) then you can only use a JSON backup. If you have restored (imported) bookmarks from an HTML backup and thus lost tags then you will have to restore an older JSON backup that still has the tags. I don't remember if there have been issues reported with missing tags.

Do you have any older backups you could check? They would be here:

Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using one 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

In the first table on the page, on the Profile Folder row, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.

Double-click into the bookmarkbackups folder.

Here you should find files that go back a couple weeks, with the date coded into the file name. Please back these up somewhere to avoid having them cycled out in future backups.

You can convert a backup to HTML using the following tool:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html

Just before the Export HTML button is an option to show the tags next to the links (instead of just buried in the HTML). I just added that tonight, so let me know if that works for you.

sanderfiers said

Does someone has a link or source with a statement whether tags are included in the removal of the description fields since Firefox v62?

Neither Tags text nor Description text was removed in Firefox 62. However, the field that lets you view and edit Descriptions was removed.

cor-el said

An HTML backup doesn't include tags (does include descriptions), so if you need to preserve tag and descriptions (only the latter have been removed) then you can only use a JSON backup. ...

OK thanks for the warning that tags aren't inside HTML backups.

When restoring my backup via JSON (also for HTML btw) on a Firefox 60.2.0esr, it's always resulting in a "warning: unresponsive script". I have to click multiple times on "continue script" in order to continue the importing. I see my bookmarks and unique tags coming in in batches. But it's hard when Firefox is so unresponsive. Until Firefox finally crashes. When re-opening Firefox I could see a lot of bookmarks and unique. But not sure about the integrity of the data, as I don't know if the import was 100% complete. All my used tags are listed under the tags section. But when looking at bookmarks, they have no tags assigned to them. I only have a very few bookmarks that do display the assigned tags.

From seeing the listing of my unique tags under the tags section, I assume the data has not been lost, but not displaying correctly...

jscher2000 said

sanderfiers said

Does someone has a link or source with a statement whether tags are included in the removal of the description fields since Firefox v62?

Neither Tags text nor Description text was removed in Firefox 62. However, the field that lets you view and edit Descriptions was removed.

OK thanks for this info. But do you have link to a statement from Firefox about this? Besides the short phrase in the release notes. I would like to read more details on this topic. To understand the logic behind the Description field removal. To see the roadmap, on when they will remove the text also.

jscher2000 said

... You can convert a backup to HTML using the following tool: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/bookbackreader.html ...

Thank you for this very useful tool; and thank you for adding the tags option so promptly. Kudos to you! When viewing the converted HTML file, I can see a lot of tags displayed next to each bookmark. But it's quit surprising the first half of my bookmark list, all have tags. And the last half, only very few of them have tags. That is so bizarre, as I am sure nearly all of bookmarks had tags (except a folder labeled 'to_sort' with links that I need to cleanup).

At the same time I took the opportunity to check whether I am using the Descriptions feature or not. Thanks to your great tool, I found out I am not. At least one thing to not worry about. :-)

Hi sanderfiers, only showing tags on part of the list could be my fault. I only have a half dozen tags added for testing, so there certainly could be problems in the script.

That said, if you compare what you see in the converted backups vs. what you see in Firefox currently, do they match up, or does your older backup have a lot more tags than your current Firefox?

If tags have been slipping away over time, it could be difficult to recover older ones. Possible sources of old "bookmarkbackups" files include:

• backups you make from time to time
• restore points -- do not use Windows System Restore! That usually makes things worse. I'll mention a method below for mining restore points for old files.
• if you ever used the Refresh feature, a folder on your Windows desktop named Old Firefox Data
• old system files (depending on the age of your computer, you might have files from an older system)
• 28-day refresh archive -- a Windows system refresh may create a folder named C:\Windows.old which is kept for 28 days

Here's the rundown on mining files out of restore points:

(1) Set Windows to show hidden files and folders:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14201/windows-show-hidden-files

(2) Download and run one of these programs:

• ShadowExplorer: http://www.shadowexplorer.com/
• System Restore Explorer: http://nicbedford.co.uk/software/systemrestoreexplorer/

Within the most recent restore point shown in the program, you can explore along this path to see whether you can find a timely shadow copy of your profile:

\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

(3) Export a full copy of your old bookmarkbackups folder (or individual old files) to your currently live Desktop or Documents folder (not the desktop/documents inside the restore point).

If you convert some files, are more tags present?

It is of course a huge pain to merge and de-duplicate bookmarks after multiple imports, but it's also difficult to picture re-adding all the tags manually, so... some difficulty appears to lie ahead one way or the other.

The description field has been remove as part of the effort to avoid main-thread IO for places.sqlite. The API used for the description was running on the main-thread (synchronous) and thus affected the Firefox responsiveness.

• bug 1402890 - Stop supporting and remove the description annotation [63]
• bug 1463738 - Remove the Bookmark description UI [62]

This started already seven years ago:

• bug 699844 - Remove the Annotations Service API

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

@jscher2000,

Yes, the output (including tags) of your tool matches with the bookmarks currently in my -synced- Firefox library.

But like you said, I fear tags have been slipping away over time. Which is a problem off course. I could always recover them from an old bookmark backup (luckily I backup both to HTML and JSON, as apparently tags are not in HTML-backups). But then I would be working with outdated data, as many (edited) bookmarks would be lost since that date.

And I prefer losing tags over losing bookmarks. I could always manually re-tag my bookmarks again. Time consuming, but better then losing any bookmarks. But like you stated already: I fear difficulty lies ahead ...

Or are you aware of any tool that can check the delta between two bookmark backups? With some intelligence that is, just a file diff wouldn't do it. Such a tool should take into account bookmarks can be renamed, moved to other folders, ...

Also, ever since the introduction of the Firefox Sync feature, I wondered why the developers didn't add an option to backup the data. Especially for users with less IT-affinity: people will think data is safe as they are synchronizing it. But a sync, is not a backup: when things go wrong, they can't restore.

@cor-el: thank you very much for that information.

sanderfiers said

And I prefer losing tags over losing bookmarks. I could always manually re-tag my bookmarks again. Time consuming, but better then losing any bookmarks. But like you stated already: I fear difficulty lies ahead ...

Or are you aware of any tool that can check the delta between two bookmark backups?

If you were to convert multiple backups to HTML-format bookmark files, you would have the raw material.

However, if you import them, it would pile up numerous duplicates. De-duplicating extensions cannot "see" Tags, so they wouldn't help you in determining which one bookmark to keep and which to toss.

Probably an external tool will be needed.