Hi

Thank you for your question about the Firefox Sync service.

It appears from your question, that you are using Firefox Sync as a back up service. This is not what Sync is designed to do. The Firefox Sync service takes a copy of the data you wish to include and transfers it to a second device (typically a mobile device such as a tablet or a telephone) running a copy of Firefox. The storage in between all attached devices is both temporary and fragile and is not stable enough to be (and is not designed as) a reliable backup service.

If you have a copy of your Firefox profile for desktop Firefox, you may be able to recover your bookmarks and other data. Please have a read of this article.

If you have a copy of your data on a mobile version of Firefox, please follow these instructions to connect it to Firefox Sync to copy your data.

1. Sync "synchronizes" all selected data so that it is the same on all devices.

2. The "master file" is on the Sync server, in so far as the data from each device is sent to the Sync server where the data is merged. Once each device is connected to the Sync server the data should be the same on each device, and the same as on the Sync server.

3. Export / Import will work to transfer Bookmarks to a device, appending the existing Bookmarks on the device. Do that more than once and you end up with a lot of duplicated Bookmarks and folders of Bookmarks; unlike Sync where Bookmarks won't be duplicated as a group.

"the-edmeister" Thank you for your response. Let me give you a little more information. I have a partition with Windows 10 32bit on my pc , I updated my memory and wanted to install Windows 10 64bit to be able to use the additional memory. I of course had to install it on a separate partition because you cannot just update Windows to 64 bit. I then downloaded Firefox and tried to use Sync to get my bookmarks etc. , It did not work. I also installed PCLINUX on another partition because both versions of Windows 10 keep crashing. It came with Firefox. I then tried to sync it and it did not work. If the master sync is located on a sync server then why did this not work?

"Seburo"

No I am not trying to use it as a backup. I am trying to sync new versions of Firefox with my old version of Firefox which is on a Windows 10 32bit partition on the same pc. I now have a Windows 32bit partition, a Windows 10 64 bit partition and a PCLINUX partition on the same device and am trying to get the various versions of Firefox to sync. According to “edmeister” the master sync file is on a sync server so sync should work this way but didn’t.

Thanks for your reply.

To quote Firefox "well this is embarrassing". I went to my old version of Firefox that I had used for the original sync and sign in account. It said "sign in to sync" instead of my email. I sign in and hit sync. It did, I then went to Windows 10 64bit version and did sync and all my bookmarks were there.

Somehow, I lost the original sync file but all is ok now.

Thanks for your replies.