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Caution when using custom Bookmarks Location

In my previous post Firefox Bookmarks Location and Moving it I mentioned about browser.bookmarks.file in about:config to save your bookmarks in a different location.

I just wanted a short mention of a caveat that if by any chance you have it pointed to a removable disk (eg. external hard drive/disk) and being careless you could loose those bookmarks [more]

1. you open Firefox before with the disk disconnected

2. you plugin the removable disk

3. then you close Firefox

it will overwrite your bookmarks.html with whatever bookmarks you had since step1. Since it was not able to load your bookmarks.html from the removable disk at part1, they will be lost when you close the browser at step three. That is during step2, despite you plugging in the removable disk it will not reload its bookmark list. There probably is a reason for this (to complicated to implement autodetection) so will not consider it as a bug (nevertheless will find time to report to Mozilla later) but just a little warning.

If you have to been on step1 or step2 already and you realize your in this situation just disconnect your removable disk before step. In that way the bookmarks fille not be overwritten and FF will not throw an error even if it doesn't see the custom bookmarks location (it will likely save to its known default).

And also worth noting that I've been using Google Bookmarks too if I run into this. That is if I run into this situation, I remove the disk but also want to make pages ive opened since step1 so I save them to Google Bookmarks (I have Google Toolbar installed so it's convenient as clicking a button) then I may or may not open it later and save to my Firefox bookmarks if I already have the bookmarks from the removable disk loaded.

For the extra careful, it's always a good idea to backup your bookmarks.html too. 

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