Opera: How To Restore Destroyed Bookmarks

Did Opera just overwrote all your bookmarks? Not all is lost, yet.

Today, due to my mistake and a possible bug in the latest build of the Opera 12.2 (Build: 1627), I have lost all my bookmarks, ranging from 2004 till this day.

Now, although I had a backup, the recently changed location of the Opera bookmarks file (I’ve moved it to another drive), it did not include the data. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy.

How did this happen?

You don’t really need to read this part if all you want is to get your data but any way…

– I use a virtual TrueCrypt drive for my passwords and other browser data, which I manually mount before opening a web browser
– Upon turning on my PC, I forgot about the TrueCrypt and just launched Opera, which then asked: Bookmarks.adr is missing in Z:/User Data…/, Retry? Yes/No.
– So I mount the drive, click “Yes” and all is good. However, since the speeddial.ini was missing too and there was no prompt for that, I had to restart my web browser.
– Upon restart, everything seemed to be normal, my wands were there, cookies and Speed Dial. However, when I checked my bookmarks, they were gone. Not only that, but the bookmarks.adr file was 1 KB in size, which for some reason, Opera has reset and/or overwritten.

I have no idea why Opera did that but thankfully, I was able to restore the data.

How to restore the data?

– Go to C:\Users\*\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera
– Look for the .tmp files (it was not bookmarks.ini.old) with the recent “Modified” date, in my case, it was opr45E1.tmp, modified 5 days ago.
– Copy / Paste it to your desktop and rename it to opr45E1.adr
– Open Opera, click on the menu (Alt) > Settings > Import and Export > Import Opera bookmarks
– If you are lucky enough, Opera will inform you about the successful import. However, if this does not happen, just look for other .tmp files and try again.

That’s pretty much it. Good luck.