12.15 suddenly vanishing bookmarks horror show

[t-bone tone]

t-bone tone last edited by

Screaming can be healthy they say, which is just as well. Somehow - God knows - all my bookmarks vanished. I just noticed clicking on bookmarks yesterday brought nothing up. I carefull checked in where bookmarks are kept c/Users/New/App Data/Roaming/Opera/Opera and looked in desperation for a folder. I found a file called bookmarks.adr...which was a mere 216 bytes. I tried restoring a previous version from the day before by right clicking and selecting 'restore previous versions', but that seemed around the same size. Other options were there from restore points, latest being - grrrr- Feb 2014. However, it will not allow me to open it to see size, only restore it.

Am I going about this the right way?

How on earth have the bookmarks just suddenly vanished, though??? Everything else is still there, speed dials, and notes. If I had inadvertently clicked delete bookmarks, I would have expected a message to inform me if I was sure, etc etc? However, I can assure you I never touched the damm things, the only thing I have done on my machine was in CC Cleaner, where I unticked internet explorer in cleaning options, as I never use IE.

[lando242]

lando242 last edited by

Well, that sucks. It happens. Could have been anything that deleted them. Remember to store a backup in the future.

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

If I had a dollar for each time in the old MyOpera forums that a user posted the same complaint about Olde Opera, I'd buy a new computer right now. About all one can say is that it happens to some users - without warning. I've had it happen once in perhaps 10 years of using Olde Opera; other users have never run into it. As best I can tell, if a key Opera user data file (like bookmarks.adr) is not properly closed or experiences a hiccup of some kind when Opera shuts down and routinely attempts to copy its latest file version from RAM over to disk, the disk copy can get corrupted. When Opera next reopens, if the disk file isn't readable, Opera automatically copies in a fresh default version of the file (eg, your 216 byte file). Because the old file's name is used for the new file copy, the old file disk occupancy is essentially put in play and vulnerable for future file-overwriting by the OS.

The only really good solution is to keep backups of your Opera data files. Using the shadow copy backup as you've noted is a workable solution, if all else fails; but as you've observed, the available versions can be quite dated. As a minimum, I prefer to make a backup of all my browser personal data files at least weekly. In my case, I use a batch file run via Task Scheduler to simply copy the entire browser folder containing the data files to a second hard drive every week, over-writing whatever is stored there.

[t-bone tone]

t-bone tone last edited by

Yes, been 10 years since I been using Opera myself and first time this happened. Seemingly no use doing windows restore point as it doesnt restore files.
WHen I tried to restore the files from the bookmarks.adr, at first I got a message saying files had been restored...but another message said 'Restore skipped restoring the file: C:\Users\new\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera\bookmarks.adr to original location'.
SUre enough, the bookmarks.adr is unchanged, but in c:/Users/new/AppData/Local/Temp...there are files with the time/date of the attempted restore inlcuding a text file with the previous message.. then here are two files with gobbledegook.TMP that are around 16kb.....two files ending in CVR, a pythonrunner.dll, and a DalMeasurementFile2 text file?

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Typically, when I restore a shadow copy of a file (by highlighting the file name in Explorer, right-clicking that name, selecting Properties, then selecting the Previous Versions tab), if there are previous copies in existence, a list will appear after a lengthy file search that allows me to select which version I want. If there are no copies available for whatever reason, it will tell me so. If your Windows installation doesn't have shadow-copying enabled, there will be no copies present; if it is enabled, depending on the size of your shadow-copy allocation and the number of files on your system, there may or may not be several copies present, along with their dates. In any case, I've never run into your experience while attempting file restoration from shadow copies (and which I've done successfully multiple times), which leads me to wonder if we're both talking about the same kind of "restore" process.

[t-bone tone]

t-bone tone last edited by

yes, we are talking about the same restoration process :O). Sure enough, a single restore copy at the top, which was from the day before but same size as current bookmarks.adr, then 4 back up copies are listed most recent of these being feb 2014.

The message indicated some of the restore files were skipped and that a different location should be selected and restore process tried again. However, as the bookmarks.adr is in C:\Users\new\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera......when trying to copy it to a different location...my documents....when right clicking on theis copy of bookmarks.adr to select restore previous versions, none were shown for some bizarre reason. ALso, seemingly the restored versions shown as back-ups are on a external USB or hardrive.
I have a feeling this gobbledeegook.TMP file is the older full bookmarks.adr somehow.

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Ordinarily, the shadow file copies come from restore points (if shadow copying is enabled) or from Windows backups. So the "location" shown in the backup listing is the place where the backup file is supposed to be located for the named file in the current folder. An external drive or USB stick would seem to indicate that a record in the shadow copy index for the bookmarks filename shows a backup was made to those media at some point or another. I'm not sure what the peculiar.tmp file is, unless the shadow copy process somehow uses such a file as part of its attempt to restore a given backup. The shadow copy mechanism is keyed to the folder where the filename in question is currently located, so if that file in C:\Users\new\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera was never backed up via a restore point or a Win Backup in that folder location, then it would never have created a listing for itself in the shadow listings associated with that folder.

The shadow copy listing is actually just a listing by name of files and their source location that were backed up via the restore point mechanism (extended to non-system files by the Windows shadow-copy setting) or by creating Windows Backups at some points in time. The files themselves reside in those backup records. If one is not auto-setting restore points with some frequency, then shadow copies don't get created by that means until/unless a restore point is eventually set. If you dump or delete restore points, then you lose all the shadow copies of files from those deleted records as well. Or at least, this is how I understand it works.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

I feel your pain OP!
Having had a few nasty incidents of losing data due to computer crashes (if it crashes while Opera is open all sorts of data files can be corrupted, bookmarks, history, wand data etc.) I now back up my whole system to an external drive every week, something I would recommend everyone to do.
I'm also in the habit of regularly saving backup copies of files like wand.dat as wand.dat.backup in the same folder.
These won't get trashed if there's a crash, and are easy to restore just by renaming them.
That's no help now of course, but I would recommend getting hold of a free undelete program (I use Undelete Plus, but there are others) which will scan your hard drive and show you any recoverable files.
You may be lucky and find a copy of bookmarks.adr which hasn't been overwritten yet and may be recoverable.