Friday, March 18, 2011

"Merging" Bookmarks from Separate Firefox Profiles

I recently found myself needing to move a few bookmarks from an old Firefox profile (on an old drive) to a new profile (on the current drive). I didn't want to replace the bookmarks in the new profile, only add to them; nor did I want all of the old bookmarks, only a few significant ones (for which I did not know the URL, nor were they easily Googleable).

Firefox 3+ has switched from storing bookmarks in a fairly easy to navigate html file to now storing them in the places.sqlite file. To manually browse through this file, I found that SQLite Manager works quite well.

I messed with this for a while and didn't have any luck actually extracting the URLs from the sqlite file. After working through a few other self-devised plans, nothing succeeded and I moved on to solving the problem rather than understanding why I was failing. I think what made this difficult was that I didn't want to lose what was, and didn't want all of the old, just to merge the two. Anyway...

Best solution:
I made a backup of the current bookmarks. Imported the last backup of the old bookmarks. Opened the pages I wanted in separate tabs (was only like 10ish). Restored the backup of the "current" bookmarks. Proceeded to bookmark all open tabs and then reorganize as needed.

Solved. ^.^

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