Hi

Thank you for your question about the Firefox Sync service.

It appears from your question, that you are using Firefox Sync as a back up service. This is not what Sync is designed to do. The Firefox Sync service takes a copy of the data you wish to include and transfers it to a second device (typically a mobile device such as a tablet or a telephone) running a copy of Firefox. The storage in between all attached devices is both temporary and fragile and is not stable enough to be (and is not designed as) a reliable backup service.

If you have a copy of your Firefox profile for desktop Firefox, you may be able to recover your bookmarks and other data. Please have a read of this article.

If you have a copy of your data on a mobile version of Firefox, please follow these instructions to connect it to Firefox Sync to copy your data.

I was forced to format my laptop PC, with no intent of using Firefox Sync as a back up service.

By a miracle of happenstance, I still have access to my collection of bookmarks from my phone only.

I could spend an hour or two clicking on each one from my phone, reading the address, typing it into my laptop, saving it as a bookmark, creating the folderpath it used to be in, etc., but I'm confident that there is an easier way.

My bookmarks exist on my phone. They do not exist on my PC. They are in my handheld device and I only need to move them from there to my laptop.

To reiterate: How do I move the bookmarks that do exist on and can be accessed using my phone to my laptop, which has lost all the data that was once on it's drives?

Were you able to log in to your Firefox Account on that laptop computer?

If so, Sync should synchronize your bookmarks to your laptop, but maybe not as quickly as you would expect it to happen.

Also, you can type about:sync-log in the URL bat and hit Enter. Do you see any error logs there?

I so, post the log to https://pastebin.mozilla.org/ and then give us the resultant URL so someone can review the error log and gain some insight to why Sync didn't work for you.

I solved my problem on my own. If anyone else is suffering my strife, I solved my problem like so: While using my phone, I saw an update saying Firefox Mobile was "Unable to sync" and that tapping on the update would fix the issue. After tapping the update, I was brought to a sign-in screen asking for my Firefox Sync login details. After logging in, nothing changed on my mobile device save for a "Success!" screen. After all of this, I clicked on the sync button in my browser again (to see if anything had changed) to find that finally my data was being loaded into my laptop.

I think my problem was that I changed my password for Firefox when signing in again, because I relied so heavily on the automatic password saving of Sync that I couldn't remember my original password. My phone's login became invalid at that point and I was unaware of that. Once my phone's login was valid again, the data it stored became available to the rest of my synced devices

If this doesn't solve your issue, and the previous suggestion doesn't either, I also found the explanation of Firefox Profiles to be extremely useful, even though it did not apply to my specific issue as my machine had been completely wiped clean.

SirCrotchBeard said

I think my problem was that I changed my password for Firefox when signing in again, because I relied so heavily on the automatic password saving of Sync that I couldn't remember my original password. My phone's login became invalid at that point and I was unaware of that. Once my phone's login was valid again, the data it stored became available to the rest of my synced devices

Yes, that will force the Sync server to delete all stored data for your Firefox Account. The encryption of user data that is sent to the Sync server uses the account password to create the encryption "keys"; different "keys" won't decrypt user data so that data is cleared.

Before that "clear all data" was instituted in Firefox 29, the user had to create a new Sync account to get a "fresh start". I went thru 5 different email addresses over the run of Firefox 4.0 (when Sync first became a standard feature in Firefox) and Firefox 29 when that feature of clearing user data came about with the Weave/ Sync 1.5 version.