Cleaned computer, now lost all speed dials and bookmarks
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blackbird71 last edited by@sing9942 said in Cleaned computer, now lost all speed dials and bookmarks:
It's a little too late to suggest that, ya think?
Though it's too late now to fix your lost data, there are some points of information you should understand going forward. Everything software-related on your computer each lives in different files on your hardrive. When you 'run' a program, Windows copies some of that program's files into quick-access RAM memory and saves copies of those memory-based files back to the hardrive periodically as you make changes during the running of the program. For the computer to be able to run a program, it has to be able to find those program-related files on the drive, so it creates an index of where the files are on the drive. When you or someone else "cleans up" a computer, they're actually removing files of various kinds from the drive and/or removing index entries to where those files are located. Every file on the drive lives at a different address, so if a cleanup is done improperly or inaccurately, either the wrong files may be deleted or the index values may be incorrectly altered.
Things like bookmarks and settings are data elements that live in files on a drive. If the cleanup operator fails to understand which files are critical for a given program, they may wipe out something important that wrecks at least part of the program. Not all programs put their files into the same kinds of structures or sequences. Opera doesn't store its files in the same places as Chrome, nor does it necessarily name them the same way. So a cleaner has to accurately know what he's doing. In your case, the cleaner most probably didn't.
A cookie is simply a tiny file created by a visited website on your computer to store site-related details (logins, what page you visit, etc) and can often be deleted safely - assuming one knows where that particular browser has filed its cookies. A cache is simply a file or collection of similar files that contain various kinds of information that is often reused or referenced in some way. Bookmarks (aka 'favorites') are files that simply list contact instructions to websites you may want to revisit. But again, unless one knows exactly what they're doing, "cleaning" a computer risks removing the wrong kinds of files from the wrong places.
Various companies make money from "cleaning" a client's computer by remotely deleting what the cleaner deems to be 'unimportant' files, but even one error made in deciding what is important or where it's located risks breaking a program or its settings. Unfortunately, such cleaner companies are often staffed by folks of uneven competency who may simply not know what they're doing where some programs are concerned. You would be far better off in the future by dumping the use of such "cleaning" services. The best approach is to take the time to learn how to create genuine backups of file or drive data so that you can restore things when bad things happen (for whatever reason) to good data.
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eltiro last edited by
Lost all my speed dials not through cleanup but an update. I was organising my speed dials when I had a computer crash. When I restarted Opera it asked to restart due to an update. This I did and then all my Speed Dials are gone.
I can see them in the Bookmarkfile under Other Bookmarks but do not know how to get them to appear in Opera again. Pse help. -
burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
@eltiro said in Cleaned computer, now lost all speed dials and bookmarks:
I can see them in the Bookmarkfile under Other Bookmarks
If you goto the URL
opera://bookmarksin Opera, do you see them there in "other bookmarks" too? -
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eltiro last edited by
@eltiro Another question is somebody knows the answer:
The files in Bookmarks and bookmarksextra seem to be some kind of xml files. If that is correct I suppose some other program should be able to open them?
I also tried to transfer the files in an usb to another computer and replace the existing files there but to no avail.
Strange because I seem to recollect that some years back that is what you could do to transfer bookmarks from one computer to another. But maybe I am wrong. -
burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
@eltiro They're JSON files. You can view/edit them with JSONedit for example.
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eltiro last edited by
Unfortunately I screwed up the data I had saved (mixed up usb) so nothing doing. Thanks anyway.
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