Need help identify clippings backup/restore options (lost clippings after reverting to v5.5.2)

[Orlando Scarlet]

Hi,

Hoping somebody can help me identify potential recovery options after I didn't think something through carefully enough and ended up inadvertently losing my clippings data.

After a laptop change and moving from Window 7 to Windows 10, I had started using Firefox Quantum only to need to move back to using Firefox ESR yesterday (I could not live without some trusted plugins, like Lazarus, that aren't supported in Quantum). As part of that move I also needed to revert clippings from v6 to 5.5.2, but ran into some unexpected inconsistency issues between the versions of plugins so ended up deleting all plugins from Firefox ESR and re-installing all ESR plugins cleanly. As part of this process I appear to have lost my clippings files and, since I had not planned to remove clippings in advance I had not taken a backup of my most recent clippings. I have an older backup, so all is not lost, but I would loose quite a few new clipping definitions that it would be quite painful to recreate, so I started exploring recovery options.

So far I can only locate clippings-backup and clipdat2.rdf (C:\Users\<USER>) that seem vanilla and created for the freshly installed clippings 5.5.2 -- is there a different automatic backup file for clippings v6 that I need to look for?

I do have automated backups of my laptop C drive via Code 42, so I should be able to locate older files if needed but I can't locate copies of clippings-backup and clipdat2.rdf from backups taken before yesterday, so suspect these files are clippings v5 specific.

I do find what look to be additional Clippings related files under "C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<PROFILE>\storage\default\moz-extension+++d67b96ea-21b5-4994-8207-1b2cddd887da" which contains:

|--- .metadata
|--- .metadata-v2
+--- idb
     +--- 220207427asegCnliipp.files
     |     |--- <empty dir>
     |
     +--- 3713173747_s_edmban.files
     |     |--- <empty dir>
     |
     |--- 220207427asegCnliipp.sqlite
     |--- 3713173747_s_edmban.sqlite
 

Is this a backup from clippings v6 that I can in someway recover from?

Can somebody provide a procedure I can follow to recover this?

Would I need to install these files somewhere where I can run Firefox Quantum or just install/startup Quantum to be able to see the previous clippings?

Finally, if I get the v6 clippings definitions back, is there an option in v6 to export the clippings in a format that can be used with v5.5.2 (the ultimate intent is to be able to use in 5.5.2 the set of original clippings I'd imported to v6 from a v5.5.2 export plus newly created clipping definitions created in v6 since the move.

Any help offered will be very gratefully received!

Regards,
Orlando

[ateng]

Clippings 6 doesn't have an automatic backup feature. Those files you located are the data files that store the database used by Clippings 6. It is unlikely that they would contain any recoverable data, because uninstalling a WebExtension in Firefox Quantum also deletes all user data associated to it. This is by design for WebExtensions, and Clippings 6 is no exception, unfortunately.


Alex

---
AE Creations website
http://aecreations.sourceforge.net/

the AE Creations blog
http://aecreations.blogspot.com/