[ale] lost in the home directory

[Adric Net]

Hi drifter,

If this is a recent Mozilla, say Firefox 3 or newer, then AFAIK the  
bookmarks, history, stored usernames, and whatnot are all in sqlite3  
files, like so:
lorelei-lee-long:llysnb8k.default adric$ ls *.sqlite
content-prefs.sqlite	permissions.sqlite	urlclassifier.sqlite
cookies.sqlite		places.sqlite		urlclassifier2.sqlite
downloads.sqlite	search.sqlite		webappsstore.sqlite
formhistory.sqlite	signons.sqlite

I do also have some bookmark files, which may be quite old, as well as  
the backup files.

lorelei-lee-long:llysnb8k.default adric$ ls bookmark*
bookmarks-1.html		bookmarks.html
bookmarks-2.html		bookmarks.postplaces.html
bookmarks.bak			bookmarks.preplaces.html

bookmarkbackups:
bookmarks-2009-08-27.json	bookmarks-2009-08-31.json
bookmarks-2009-08-28.json	bookmarks-2009-09-01.json
bookmarks-2009-08-29.json

JSON is a JavaScript XML(?) object format, kind of like Java serialize  
or python pickle(). You should be able to dig up some libraries in  
your favorite language to muck about with.

Ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_Places_database

hth,
adric

On Sep 1, 2009, at 4:21 PM, drifter wrote:

> I need to copy to another machine my Mozilla bookmarks file.  And I  
> can't
> find it!
>
> I had thought it would be in /home/.mozilla/firefox/ 
> i245ls3e.default  . . .
> but the bookmark file there is only the initial one provided at  
> startup, not
> the much larger one that I use every day.
>
> digging one level deeper there is a directory /bookmarkbackups that  
> appears
> to contain a daily backup over the past week.  But these are .json  
> files and
> I can not figure out how to convert them back into html that another  
> browser
> can import.
>
> hints would be appreciated.
>
> Sean
>
>
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Adric Net
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