Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Este fío arquivouse. Faga unha nova pregunta se precisa axuda.

'unable to process the backup file' - JSON bookmarks file

  • 1 resposta
  • 4 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

spartan117
spartan117
more options

I deleted my appdata files without thinking, and then cleared my recycle bin. When I opened up firefox again all of my bookmarks were gone. I used piriform recuva to find my deleted files, and recovered the ten bookmark backup JSON files. When I try to restore my bookmarks I get the message 'unable to process the backup file'. The files are 95kb in size, but when I open them up using notepad they're empty, however, when using the restore tool it says '480 items', which I'm assuming is the amount of bookmarks I had, which implies that the firefox can see the data. The same happens for all ten backups I recovered.

Any help would be appreciated.

I deleted my appdata files without thinking, and then cleared my recycle bin. When I opened up firefox again all of my bookmarks were gone. I used piriform recuva to find my deleted files, and recovered the ten bookmark backup JSON files. When I try to restore my bookmarks I get the message 'unable to process the backup file'. The files are 95kb in size, but when I open them up using notepad they're empty, however, when using the restore tool it says '480 items', which I'm assuming is the amount of bookmarks I had, which implies that the firefox can see the data. The same happens for all ten backups I recovered. Any help would be appreciated.

Chosen solution

What is the name of this file?

Firefox may only be looking at the file name for the number of items.

  • bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.json

The files in the bookmarkbackups folder are currently in compressed .jsonlz4 format (i.e they show binary data similar to a ZIP compressed archive) and can't be decompressed easily to have them in JSON text format. That the files are compressed means that a single error in the file will make it impossible to decompress the file.

Did you check all the available JSON backups to see if any works?

A manually created JSON backup is still uncompressed, so can easily be inspected or opened in a text editor (Scratchpad > "Pretty Print"), but with a compressed file this is much harder.

Recovering a file via an undelete utility is no guarantee that the space occupied by the file hasn't been used by another file and thus is corrupted.

Ler a resposta no contexto 👍 0

All Replies (1)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Chosen Solution

What is the name of this file?

Firefox may only be looking at the file name for the number of items.

  • bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD_<item count>_<hash>.json

The files in the bookmarkbackups folder are currently in compressed .jsonlz4 format (i.e they show binary data similar to a ZIP compressed archive) and can't be decompressed easily to have them in JSON text format. That the files are compressed means that a single error in the file will make it impossible to decompress the file.

Did you check all the available JSON backups to see if any works?

A manually created JSON backup is still uncompressed, so can easily be inspected or opened in a text editor (Scratchpad > "Pretty Print"), but with a compressed file this is much harder.

Recovering a file via an undelete utility is no guarantee that the space occupied by the file hasn't been used by another file and thus is corrupted.