How to recover Tor browser bookmarks?

Support & Help Requests
#1

After my Tor browser wasn't launching swiftly as usual having clicked several times the Tor icon in Menu, I started Tor Launcher and semi-accidentally pressed "Reinstall Tor browser", but after approximately 30-40% of reinstallation progress bar I closed it, run bleachbit and restarted the PC, because I was unsure if my Tor bookmarks will be preserved.
I made a copy of hidden folders .mozilla and .local (+.config and .cache, if anything) from /home/username before the restart.

It seems for me that if I reinstall Tor browser via Ubuntu Mate Welcome screen, the Tor bookmarks should be preserved? Will they?

#2

Tor Browser bookmarks should be located in your Profile Directory ~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default or somewhere very similar.

You can open about:support in Tor-browser to check and see what your Profile Directory is.

I have not tested your use-case but if the bookmarks are not preserved you should be able to import them from your backup.

#3

This directory is already empty, both in copy and in original.
Are there any possibilities to restore Tor bookmarks?
(I have also Brave browser installed with Tor integrated)

#4

If you are browsing the folders with Caja make sure you are using show hidden Ctrl + H to show hidden files.

If there are no files then there is unfortunately nothing to recover. Unless you really want to get deep into file recovery. if so please see this Recovering deleted files and folders.

Good luck @smith75

#5

Testdisk shows that under ~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/ directory there is a "BrowserMetrics_somechars.pma" file highlighted in red font. So I recovered it in a different directory, it is a binary file with readable stuff related to "Iris" and seems rather small to contain bookmarks. Iris is a software to reduce monitor flicker and change display colors. Why is it included in the Tor's .pma file?
It can't be opened in text editors.

Also testdisk displays other files highlighted in red in another Tor directory with ../tbb/..

Additional details:
There are 2 disk selections (with identical sizes in sectors) relevant to the location of Tor bookmark files to recover:
/dev/mapper/vgubuntu--mate-root
/dev/dm-1

Both of them show "None partition table type has been detected", and after selecting this partition type "None", the testdisk menu, where it is possible to select the option to "List" the contents of a partition, shows the selected partition type as actually "P ext4" (ext4 partition was selected during the OS installation).

I may pay 10$< for restoring Tor bookmarks.

#6

Is testdisk the only way to recover Tor bookmarks? Does it really shows all available files in directories?

Maybe someone can test in a Ubuntu VM or elsewhere if after reinstalling Tor in Ubuntu Welcome screen the bookkmarks can be preserved?