Friday, October 30, 2020

Firefox and Your Bookmarks

 Recovering your bookmarks from firefox

I am writing this as an alternate method of retrieving your bookmarks, other than using Firefox itself.  I had an issue where the main drive in one of my servers decided it didn't want to boot anymore.  I could still access the data on it via an external cable, but the system became unbootable.  

In searching, I found that Firefox stores its book marks in a file called 'places.sqlite'.  That's correct, it is an sqlite database, which means bookmarks are not the only things in this file.  The file is stored in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<blah>.default-release.  Now, i am on Firefox 82 and my full path is:  ~/.mozilla/firefox/6pcydzru.default-release.  

Now, the first thing to do is to go to that directory and copy that file to some place else (don't move it, copy it).

    cp places.sqlite ~   <- Yes, I simply copied it to my home directory

The reason for this is that Firefox locks this file and working around that lock is as simple as copying it to another location.  And you can keep the same name, if you wish, its not an issue.

Now, if you were to load up that file into sqlite3 and take a look, you would see that the bookmarks are certainly there, in a table called moz_bookmarks, but the urls are hashed and not readable.  Here is what it looks like when I loaded it up and took a look:

$ sqlite3 places.sqlite
SQLite version 3.31.1 2020-01-27 19:55:54
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> .tables
moz_anno_attributes    moz_historyvisits      moz_meta             
moz_annos              moz_inputhistory       moz_origins          
moz_bookmarks          moz_items_annos        moz_places           
moz_bookmarks_deleted  moz_keywords         
sqlite> select * from moz_bookmarks;
1|2||0|0||||1602647046341000|1604087203227000|root________|1|1
2|2||1|0|menu|||1602647046341000|1602647046960000|menu________|1|3
3|2||1|1|toolbar|||1602647046341000|1602647046988000|toolbar_____|1|3
4|2||1|2|tags|||1602647046341000|1602647046341000|tags________|1|1
5|2||1|3|unfiled|||1602647046341000|1604087203227000|unfiled_____|1|8
6|2||1|4|mobile|||1602647046545000|1602647046943000|mobile______|1|2
7|2||2|0|Mozilla Firefox|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|hk7fo0BVoSNm|0|1
8|1|3|7|0|Help and Tutorials|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|mtMmQ-E9oI58|0|1
9|1|4|7|1|Customize Firefox|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|DrTu2wYZmIj-|0|1
10|1|5|7|2|Get Involved|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|-sWrRJ5NeO8R|0|1
11|1|6|7|3|About Us|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|LCI5sKvqimve|0|1
12|2||2|1|Ubuntu and Free Software links|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|wvi_2QDOZLm9|0|1
13|1|7|12|0|Ubuntu|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|Zfpq8U7qHTzz|0|1
14|1|8|12|1|Ubuntu Wiki (community-edited website)|||1602647046960000|1602647046960000|6A8e4nK1328m|0|1

This isn't really usable, by any stretch, at the moment.  But a little googling, and I found a site called purposeful.co.uk, whom posted a nice shell script which would do the job for you.  
The link to this is: http://www.purposeful.co.uk/software/places2bookmarks/

The script is on there for you to copy to your system, I am not going to repost it here.  But, for readability, I will say that I modified a single line in the script.  Here is the modified line:

echo "$3  <A HREF=\"$url\">$title</A><br />"

As you can see, I added a '<br />' so each link would be on its own line, making things much nicer, and one entry per line.


Once you have the script in place (and the modification, if you so choose), you can run it like this: 

 ./places2bookmarks.sh ./places.sqlite > bookmarks.html

You will need to ensure that you replace the './' with the correct path to the files, if that is incorrect.  For me, I had them in the same directory

This doesn't seem huge thing, and sure, you could use the gui, but that is not me.  I prefer to do things on the command line and figure them out. Besides, I had fun doing it and learning about it, and thought I would share with everyone in case anyone else found it fun and fascinating.

Enjoy!

 
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