A family member decided to uninstall K-M without my permission :-( ... have I lost the bookmarks for good?

Have you checked the recycle bin? Did you have any backups? I use favorites instead of bookmarks, so I am not the best person to supply options for you.

Keep calm and take Yourself about an hour with nobody disturbing You.

First some technical info to calm You down.

Erase/delete means that the first letter of a folder or file is deleted.

The folder or file is not deleted at this point

So it is very unlikely that You lost the bookmarks.html for good.

Difficulty to find and repair depends how thorough Your family member deleted data and how You had installed K-Meleon.

Check User Data folder. You will find default locations at:
some
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/FAQ#bookmarks

For Vista and Win7 Google firefox profiles default location. K-Meleon is right there only the name is K-Meleon not Firefox naturally.

K-Meleon Profiles can be at the win98 place on other systems too when You chose to have profiles in install directory during setup. E.G for portable use.

All is probably still at the old location. And a freshly installed K-Meleon could find the profile. Else You search for it manually.

If it is deleted already please try to use the recycle bind to unerase/roll back that is mentioned already and is easy to do. Else search the recycle bin.

Erase/delete means that the first letter of a folder or file is deleted. After that Your system does not show it anymore. And it has permission to overwrite and reuse the space. Therefore the needed unerase/undelete procedure should be done soon if not right away to get best chances of success.

So if bookmarks.html is deleted and not in the recycle bin You have the use an undelete/unerase program and step by step remake the first letters of ./APDATA/K-Meleon/Profiles/Random.slt/bookmarks.html

The first the letters the erased folders and then the erased file bookmarls.html.

Free unearse programs exist in the net. Google = "free unerase program"
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=free%20unerase%20program

Random is something like 2ylha7um.slt the bold can be any letter digit combination. The unerase program will offer choices. It might be next to a folder that is not deleted... You do not need to use the right letter - any letter will do. There might be more than one deleted profile to repair. Finally You get to
repair bookmarks.html (in each found profile). That is a html file that can be opened by K-Meleon or copied to the used profile to be used as bookmarks. If You find several (each in one of the possibly several random.slt named profiles folders) bookmarks.html You will have to remember which is Yours.

You see: deleting is hard to achieve. To erase something completely You use special programs that systematically overwrite free spaces. Or You create a file with the same name to make info hard to find... Only a forensic specialist can re-store data at this point

I do not hope Your relative did not delete that thorough.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 04:55PM by guenter.

New KM-profile folders have no slt-ending anymore ;-)

True, but xps did not mention the K-Meleon version.
I still use some that have that extension.

Thx 2 siria & Sorry 2 xps, that I used outdated info that is only true for some of my profiles.

So the first profile name created by new versions of K-Meleon e.g. 1.5.4 as normally the extension .default, example: etaqbqbo.default. But You possibly still use the older name convention.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 05:04PM by guenter.

Lesson no.1, as all users learn sooner or later:
Always keep a backup copy of your profile folder :cool:

And make sure you also find it again in case of need, not that like me you think you backed it up just recently, then search like crazy but find only a 1 year old useless copy.... *blush*
(my prob was actually another backup but the lesson is the same, ARGH)

Just hope you may still find it in the recycle bin or perhaps in your user account, or manage to undelete it with guenters tips...
Next time you install it, make sure you choose (again?) the "multi-user" version, then it puts the bookmarks in your user account, not inside the program folder, that greatly enhances the chances that they survive an accidental uninstallation. Or set the bookmark-location in the preferences to any other location you wish, perhaps to your documents or such.

Hey, just found something: clicking Start/Run... and typing "explorer %appdata%" opens the user account directly (on XP at least)

Quote
JamesD
I use favorites instead of bookmarks

Me too, so never had any problems of that kind No uninstaller of any other program is going to delete the IE Favorites folder unnoticed or otherwise, unless the computer admin deletes IE itself or a complete user account. Nor can things be overwritten accidentally, since every favorite has its own file, not all faves inside one big file like "bookmarks" and "Hotlist". So it doesn't matter if K-Meleon or another browser using the IE favorites was installed "portable" (with "bookmarks" inside program folder), or as multi-user version (with "bookmarks" in user appdata folder), the favorites are always safe, they are located elsewhere anyway
Only additional macros necessary for comfortably adding new faves.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 08:02PM by siria.

It's KM 1.5.2 and my brother was using my Vista username/password login account so the profile will be mine?

1.5.2 has the same profile names type as 1.5.4 (which siria pointed me to).


AFAIK Vista has default profile location:

C:\Users\Profile\AppData\Roaming\K-Meleon\Profiles[random.string]\

Source: http://www.holgermetzger.de/pdl.html

Holger Metzger points to Mozilla/firefox and such we are looking for K-Meleon right next to it.

I do not work on Vista so I had to Google for default location of applications such as Firefox.

On Vista most PPL are using the default location.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2010 08:51PM by guenter.

I installed v 1.5.4 and the bookmarks are default. I can't see where to look to see if I still have the 'lost' bookmarks. Any help pls?

Quote
xps
I can't see where to look to see if I still have the 'lost' bookmarks.

Read the prior posts.

p.s. They point to their previous default locations - unless You brother deleted the data for good.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2011 01:38AM by guenter.

Quote
xps
I installed v 1.5.4 and the bookmarks are default. I can't see where to look to see if I still have the 'lost' bookmarks. Any help pls?

IF your brother totally deleted your bookmarks, and you have not used the computer too much or run defrag since that time, then look for this little utility, HandyRecovery.

http://www.handyrecovery.com/

It "may" recover your lost bookmarks.

Then I would suggest you manually backup up your entire profile sub-folder(s) to some other location on your hard drive or a backup drive.

P.S. I have Handy Recovery v 1.0, since then it has become trialware. Here are some alternatives.

http://lifehacker.com/393084/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-free-software

N



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2011 04:47PM by ndebord.