Where are my bookmarks stored? (Firefox 3.6)

[ChrisGreaves]

I can't find my old bookmarks after rebuilding drive C:.
I followed my customary procedures - did a full backup to an external drive, renamed "Documents and Settings" to be "Documents and Settings_20200314", which in the past has always been a neat way of preserving Bookmarks.html for resurrection after the fresh installation of Firefox (likewise for a variety of other applications)

This morning, re-establishing stuff, I see that my latest Bookmarks.html is over 18 months old.

I do see a backups folder with daily-dated *.JSON files, but am not sure what to do with them.
Any help would be appreciated.

(This is my long-awaited rebuild which is fixing many, many outstanding problems on my system)

[Leif]

Anything here help?
Firefox Help - Firefox Bookmarks Tutorial

[ChrisGreaves]

Anything here help?

Thanks, Leif.
It should help, but hasn't yet.
I shut down Firefox, delete the cache, drag the 252 KB "bookmarks-2010-03-13.json" to "C:\Documents and Settings\ChrisL\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\4uwshka4.default", rename the file to be "bookmarks.html", then reload Firefox, but the bookmarks shown are those from about 18 months ago, still, e.g. 'World Wide Words" and 'Morpheus Clinic", places I've not visited for yonks.
It is as if for the past 18 months Firefox hasn't be saving my bookmarks at all, at all, and I'm very mystified.
(ten minutes later)
:Duh: I should have used RESTORE instead of IMPORT in the Organize Bookmarks menus.

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[John Gray]

I can't find my old bookmarks after rebuilding drive C:.

They are contained within places.sqlite in the Firefox profile directory, I believe. That's why it's so pestilentially large because sqlite is spectacularly inefficient. (Over 200 MB at home, in my case...)

[HansV]

Recent versions of CCleaner have an option to compact the SQLite databases used by Firefox:

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[John Gray]

Very true - I use a Firefox extension, but compacting places.sqlite doesn't reduce the file to a sensible size! (Like 20 MB...)

[BobH]

Hello John,

IIRC, Mozilla has a tool called mozbackup that will back up and restore the options and data for both Thunderbird and Firefox. You might give it a look: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/