Description of the issue: I am a brave user for some time now and today i opened brave browser and ALL my bookmarks were missing, i’m using ease US data recovery and i have found a bookmark file but its a bit strange its bookmark.bookmark or something like that. Please someone help me i had 100s of bookmarks all in order inside of folders all organized took me a FLIPING YEAR to put everything in order please help me How can this issue be reproduced? maybe
yesterday i shutdown my computer maybe brave was open i’m not sure
@artimmy,
Do you have Brave Sync enabled at his time? Additionally, are you saying that you do have a backup of the bookmarks available on your machine?
what i have is a file (i used a program called easeUS data recovery tool to try and see if could rescue a file o the bookmarks but its kinda corrupted tho) called bookmarks, from the default user directory, it seams to have some data in it, but, its not in JSON format anymore.
@artimmy,
Do you have any extensions installed in the browser at this time? Additionally, were your bookmarks the only thing that disappeared or was other browsing data lost as well?
Yes i DO have extensions installed: Kaspersky, Json viewer, Authy, FireShot and Browse.
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Yes, so far i’m only missing bookmarks.
@artimmy,
Would you mind trying a test – simply disable your extensions (temporarily) and relaunch the browser to see if one of them may have been interfering with bookmark data retrieval.
@artimmy do you by chance have multiple profiles? There have been times where I have accidentally created a new profile. If you have multiple profiles, you’ll have an icon in the top right of the window next to the 3 lines hamburger menu. From there, you can see the other profiles.
If that is what happened, you can also delete the accidentally created profile
I lost all of my pinned top sites a week ago, too. Checked all of the usual settings/places…nothing changed. Seems like a bug in the system, probably connected to a Window 10 update.
My Brave bookmarks are missing today. I’ve been using Brave since January 2019 and created tons of bookmarks.
I’m not using multiple profiles. I am not using Brave Sync. I really don’t like the idea of sending my bookmarks to a web service. That’s a little creepy, right?
I’m running [Version 1.14.81 Chromium: 85.0.4183.102 (Official Build) (64-bit)] on Windows 10 version 2004.
The BraveSoftware/Update/Download folder shows 85.1.14.81 dated 9/15/2020. I’m guessing that was the last update. Seems like that didn’t immediately cause loss of bookmarks.
I see History dating back to June 23, 2020. It seems Brave didn’t lose all of my data, perhaps just what I really wanted to keep.
Is there any hope of recovering these bookmarks from my drive? Where would they be stored?
Going forward, what’s the best way to maintain my own backup of the bookmark data in a fully automated fashion without send them Brave Sync?
Digging in, I was able to locate the file holding my bookmarks. It’s located at:
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\Bookmarks
There’s a second file Bookmarks.bak.
These files are about 15,000 lines of readonly JSON-formatted data. Each is about 7 lines long, for a total of some 2000 entries.
Why would Brave not be loading and displaying these?
What are the appropriate steps to get these bookmarks back into Brave?
Interesting - I’m not sure what would do that. I looked both in our code and in Chromium and didn’t see anything which tries to rename in .bak format like that (if the file is just JSON). I think leveldb might create a .bak when upgrading
@billvo you can try renaming that (remove the .bak) and see what happens. You might want to close Brave and backup the entire profile folder first (%userprofile%\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\)
The .bak file was the better of the two files. The active “Bookmark.” file was apparently corrupt. Comparing the two I see entry has some unprintable characters in the “name” and “type” is merged onto the same line, so some EOL character was dropped.
The file starts with a checksum. It seems that the code that reads this is enforcing the checksum by simply ignoring the whole file without notifying the user or allowing the user to accept the damaged file.
