Restore bookmarks after hard drive failure

A Former User

I have had a hard drive failure and had to re-install my system from scratch.

I have managed to recover the Bookmarks and BookmarksExtras files from the Roaming folder in AppData on the old hard drive, but when I copy them to the new drive and start Opera, the bookmarks are not there.

If I then go to look at the bookmarks files, Opera has renamed my original version to .bak and created a new BookmarksExtras file.

How can I get my bookmarks back?

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

@scitechuk So you don't see anything on the bookmarks manager?

A Former User @leocg

@leocg No, completely empty.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

@scitechuk There were something on the files that you recovered? Were they intact?

A Former User @leocg

@leocg Bookmarks is 607K has what looks like the folder structure, BookmarksExtra is 2276K but just has null characters when opened in a text reader.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Guest

@scitechuk BookmarksExtra is just the thumbnails. You should be able to just paste the Bookmarks file into the new profile folder and see your bookmarks.

Maybe it's corrupted?

A Former User @leocg

@leocg It starts with { followed by "checksum": "066deb9a7f84b78857481fa39c84695b", and ends with a line of null characters.

blackbird71

blackbird71

My 454Kb bookmarks file, as viewed in Notepad, starts out:

{
"checksum": "f4e2cbb982bd0d067170f170c13ad682",
"roots": {
"bookmark_bar": {
"children": [ {
"date_added": "13161894605461224",
"id": "2",
"name": "-d",
"type": "url",
"url": "http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=IWX&issuedby=IWX&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1"
}, {

This is followed by a ton of similar code structure embodying all the other bookmarks bar members plus regular bookmark data. My bookmarks.bak file looks identical. The bookmarks file ends with:

}
},
"version": 1
}

It sounds like something unfortunate may have happened to your file. Do you have any other backups for it?

A Former User @blackbird71

@blackbird71 It looks like the file I have managed to recover is corrupted. I only found it by using the deep scan function of a file recovery program; the hard drive is basically trashed.

I have a live off site backup running, but I don't back up all of the AppData data folder, only a few important apps. Unfortunately I set the backup up a few years ago when Opera stored it's settings in AppData\Roaming\Opera, so that's what I have backed up. I didn't realise that Opera changed at some point to AppData\Roaming\Opera Software and that folder wasn't backed up.

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.