Where are my bookmarks?

Software PureOS
1

I finally upgraded PureOS this morning and found Purebrowser replaced with Firefox ESR. I had a ton of bookmarks and long history in Purebrowser, all of which is gone. I copied my ./purism/purebrowser to .mozilla/firefox and restarted Firefox, but my bookmarks are still gone. This is incredibly disruptive.

Is there a way to restore my Purebrowser bookmarks, or did Purism screw me with this update?

2

Take a look at this thread. It should answer your question.

3

Nope. We wrote a wiki entry before the change to help with the transition! https://tracker.pureos.net/w/troubleshooting/puretofire/

4

How does this help me if I already did the update?

The first step is “get into purebrowser” but purebrowser is gone.

I saw the notification that an update was available. There was no warning that I should save my purebrowser configuration BEFORE doing the upgrade. How was I to know?

I ask again, is there a way to get my purebrowser bookmarks AFTER I did the upgrade and no longer have purebrowser installed?

5

Please read the whole entry before commenting. This is literally the first point under the first post:

If you have already been migrated to Firefox. Just cd ~/.purism/purebrowser/ and ls -al. This will list all files and directories. The directory named USERSTRING.default is the one.

Also read through that forum post linked above to see what others experience was.

Edit: For context we noted the switch on our blog but unfortunately there is no mechanism currently to notify anyone from within PureOS.

6

Method 1 says to “get into purebrowser” but method 2 shows how to migrate your purebrowser profile to firefox using Files and the GUI. The same steps can be done from the command line just as easily (which is what I did).

Instead of depending on users reading your blog, it would have been better to include some documentation with the update itself. A README perhaps? A notification to make it obvious?

I like stability and don’t update early and often, and I don’t follow the Purism blog.

Thanks for the quick response, and I apologize for the testy nature of my comments, but imagine if all of your bookmarks disappeared with no warning and no obvious way to get them back. Not a good user experience.

7

hi ! what’s done is done …

if you want to avoid this type of inconvenience in the future you should:

  1. set-up a cron-job to do auto-backups of your /home directory/partition
  2. read-up-on > https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-backup-and-restore/
  3. you could also just back-up selectively ONLY what you want or
  4. you could set up various cron-jobs for back-ups that run at various intervals with wide coverage or provide the specific absolute path you want to back-up for only a single file/dir

you probably just forgot that this thing can happen with EACH new update if you don’t read up on what exactly the update will do to your machine

lastly - with linux you are NOT compelled to update anything if you don’t want to (as is the case with a M$OS)

heck you could even apply the updates manually if you were so inclined and have the necessary patience/skills.

8

Good advice in general, but it would not have helped in this situation. My purebrowser bookmarks and history were still there after the update. The inconvenience in this case was that purebrowser was removed and replaced with firefox. No amount of backing up would have avoided the “incovenience” of apparent data loss.

The trick, as described in the blog entry mentioned earlier in this thread, is how to copy the purebrowser profile into the new firefox profile. Having done that, my purebrowser environment has been completely moved to firefox: bookmarks, history, and everything else.

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