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Netscape 7 Lost Bookmarks


DaffiDuck

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DaffiDuck

Anyone else using Netscape 7.0 lose their bookmarks? I have not changed anything in 30 days nor added any programs and suddenly my booksmarks are not there. It has actually defaulted back to original book marks (and I had deleted those after I imported my own saved bookmarks)it has done it twice in 24 hours. I had to uninstall all of it and reboot and reinstall and for 7 days now nothing has been lost.But i have a need to know why or how this happened. I have searched and cannot find anything on this.Any help or suggestions other than the OBVIOUS back up your bookmarks?

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Guest ThunderRiver

Firebird loses bookmarks too if you make bookmarks in any of the defaults..."Bookmarks Toolbar Folder""Web Panels""Quick Searches"

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I too lost bookmarks periodically in NS 7. Moved to Mozilla 1.3 pretty quickly - it also loses them from time to time. I always try to have a backup bookmark file. Did you do a clean install of NS 7 or put it over NS 6? Any networking issues? Multiple NS profiles?

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Guest ThunderRiver

It has nothing to do with the "clean install" certainly, if you clean install, you will lose your bookmark, but the point is that even if you don't perform clean install, it might also lose bookmarks. Check out my previous post, if you put any foreign bookmark in any of the default folder, Firebird might reset itself. It is very weird, but things like that do happen to me everytime I do that.

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Prelude76

i've never heard of this and have myself used Netscape 7.x, as well as every version of Mozilla and Firebird. The only thing I can think of is if you're using Windows XP, if you recently made a new user. Turn on show hidden files, and go to Documents and Settings / *username* / Application Data / Mozilla / Profiles / default / *random folder name*It that folder, you will have a Bookmarks.html file. Since its an HTML file, you can open it and check it easily. I mean, Mozilla doesnt 'lose' your bookmarks, the file is still there. And since it defaulted to original bookmarks, I would think that something happened to cause that HTML file to be overwritten. If there is mutliple users on your XP, check each user's Application Data / Mozilla path and check to see if your bookmarks are there.Did you recently upgrade Netscape, or install Mozilla?let me know more about your system, and what you find in those paths

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My bookmarks were actually overwritten. New bookmarks file had new date & was very small. I looked everywhere including hidden files & my original bookmarks were just gone.

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GolfProRM
Firebird loses bookmarks too if you make bookmarks in any of the defaults..."Bookmarks Toolbar Folder""Web Panels""Quick Searches"
I've never run into this problem.... I don't use the Web Panels or Quick searches, but I completely customized the Bookmarsk toolbar, and have never had an issue with it losing them... Even after updating 15-20 times and copying the profile folder to other computers, I've never had this problem... maybe it was fixed?
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Even after updating 15-20 times and copying the profile folder to other computers, I've never had this problem...  maybe it was fixed?
I was probably using an earlier build of Mozilla when I had this recurring problem - I haven't had this happen recently.
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nlinecomputers

I have only had this happen once. But it wasn't my bookmarks it was my whole profile. I lost passwords, bookmarks, everything. I restored from backup and still don't know what happend. :)

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DaffiDuck

No i was not on XP, I was using Windows 98, and I just had started up the PC in the AM, having my morning coffee, and there was NOTHING on my Netscape. No personal links , which gave me the first clue that something had gone wrong.Had this been XP, i could probably have gone back to a restore point and it would have been fixed.Also it happened twice in 24 hours........I had exported some 30 days old bookmarks and went back to surfing etc.......shut down late that night and again with my morning coffee they disappeared. They WERE overwritten with defaults. Now more than 7 days later i seem to have retained bookmarks without losing them and I am still no further along in finding out why?

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Cluttermagnet

I think that some of these browsers are able to share or to import copies of other profiles in other browsers installed on your HD. Your probllem might relate to setting up one of your browsers 'wrong'. My understanding is that it is usually best to have each browser create its own profile and never to share one with another browser. I just downloaded and installed Phoenix recently. I went for the stable version 0.5 from a month or two back. It was a little tricky to set up a profile in it, which they strongly recommend. You have to run the main .exe from a "run" command and specify something like "-ProfileManager" or similar. Then it pops up a dialog window and asks you a few questions and sets up a new profile. I think the default is to share a profile from some other browser already installed that uses the same engine. Then if you go and change or delete that other browser without realizing that you had a profile shared, I can see how your bookmarks could go suddenly missing. Sorry I'm not able to give better detail or examples, but I have a heck of a lot of different browsers on my HD at the same time, and even have been known to run 2 or 3 of them at the same time without any disasters. Occasionally they interact in strange ways- such as the fact that I can't start any incidences of Beonex Communicator if I have any open instances of Mozilla 1.2- and vice versa. That is only a problem if I happen to want to find a bookmark from the other browser. I have to shut down every instance of the open browser, then open the other one, get the bookmark, close it back down, then reopen the other one I had all the open windows of.BTW I am very impressed by my first look at Phoenix. It is noticeably faster, just as others have claimed. While I will continue to keep a lot of different browsers around, I will be watching Phoenix closely. I think they may rename it back to Mozilla with later releases, now that they have completely changed the engine they are using. Another browser I like a lot is K-Meleon. A small download and has popup killing built in and works great. There are so many choices if you like to tinker or just prefer not to use IE for whatever reason. One other thing I have done is to find out which browsers use bookmarks file types that are compatible. After setting up a new browser, I might take a copy of a very complete bookmarks list from another browser and rename it to whatever the new browser is calling its bookmarks address and then do a swapout or overwrite. In other words, I clone a copy of a big bookmarks list but leave that original list alone with its original browser and just replicate it into the new browser. This can be easily done using Windows Explorer or my favorite Drag and File- or any other similar file management utility. I prefer to do it this way rather than rely an untested browser to do any 'import' bookmarks function in a manner not under my control. I limit my importing to only those cases where the format of the bookmarks list has to be changed over. Then I let the fancy software handle it for me.

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Cluttermagnet
No i was not on XP, I was using Windows 98,  and I just had started up the PC in the AM, having my morning coffee, and there was NOTHING on my Netscape.  No personal links , which gave me the first clue that something had gone wrong.Had this been XP, i could probably have gone back to a restore point and it would have been fixed.Also it happened twice in 24 hours........I had exported some 30 days old bookmarks and went back to surfing etc.......shut down late that night and again with my morning coffee  they disappeared.  They WERE overwritten with defaults.  Now more than 7 days later  i seem to have retained bookmarks without losing them and I am still no further along in finding out why?
I've found that Netscape 7.x seems especially squirrely right after an install. It's always been similar with earlier Netscapes, too. I always start it the first time not connected to the net. When it first fires up, it tries hard to 'phone home' and has a lot of settings I don't want. After I get all the preferences set the way I like them, I allow it to connect to the net, and it supposedly goes only where I tell it to! It's a fine browser once you get it defanged. I also do the minimum install and pass on Realplayer and Net2Phone and some other add-ons and 'features' that are known spyware. BTW Zone Alarm has caught it a few times trying to phone home to some Netscape server upon first starting, even after I set all the defaults for maximum privacy. It is sneaky and does not repeatedly try to do this if you close it and reopen it again. Although I can see cookies in 7.0 from the Edit/ Preferences dialog, PT Cookie can't find its profile during a search. I would not put it past these guys to hide the profile from such utilities to make it harder for 3rd party software to clean out its cookies- but it is at least easy to manage/ remove cookies from inside 7.0. Netscape has always been sneaky with the spyware, and there are so many other good browsers I think that Netscape will see less and less use here. I will still keep it around, at least. You guys have scared me into setting up better backup routines. I have all the software right now, but have just been lazy about using it. I think my bookmarks lists are prime candidates for daily backup. They get huge, and really should be weeded out more often, but there's sure a lot of neat stuff saved in them. I looked the other night, using Karen's PT Cookie utility, and found 7 profiles on my HD to search for cookies (because I run so many different browsers). I'm sure I have a similar number of bookmarks files and profiles. Some are just the small 'dummys' they start you out with, but others are mature url lists grown to around 0.5M in size. I noted with interest that both Mozilla and Phoenix have two users set up- one default and another with a user name. Another interesting fact- no cookies location is found for Netscape 7.0 although I know I have set up at least one profile. I will have to investigate further. For sure, a change or addition to users, either in a browser or in WinXP might cause massive confusion- and even moreso if two browsers are sharing a single profile and you make changes to the other browser.I think 'the' answer is probably drive imaging. I have that too, but have not gotten quite enough experience with it yet to feel confident I can actually boot from their rescue disk and successfully restore an image. Probably adding partitions and/or a second HD is a good idea, too. I have all that in my older computer but not in the newer box. Probably best to backup to a different partition or drive, plus also to regularly copy to removable media like zips or CDRs- or DVDs if you can afford it. I also run 98SE here, and use GoBack 3.0 by Roxio. Not a perfect utility but it has saved me more than once. It probably approaches the utility of XP's restore points. I have a slightly wounded OS here, with the audio all messed up from an attempted install of QuickTime gone badly wrong. At some point I will do a completely clean install on this computer and try to get it right this time. I'm not enough of a registry ace to try to fix it that way.
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  • 2 weeks later...

I had to revisit this topic. Today I was working on a friend's computer who was using NS 7 (for problems other than NS 7, I was just cleaning up some extra stuff here). The choose profile window had started coming up a month or so ago. The choices were his name profile or default. Made sure that his name profile was the profile that was current. Deleted default profile (didn't delete files, only name out of profile list - made the mistake of deleting files before on my own computer & everything went away forever). When I went back into his NS, bookmarks were gone. Bummer! Mail was still there, checked size of bookmark file, date, etc. Too small, old date. B) Explained that this had happened to me & others here. I had already discussed what absolutely HAD TO BE backed up because of the other major problems that we were working on & I had mentioned this little bookmark disappearing trick. Well lo & behold, we restarted the computer, reopened NS & they were back!!GO FIGURE!! Too bizarre!

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