I accidentally deleted my firefox profile on OS X. My bookmarks, usernames, passwords - all gone. Used data recovery software...

This may help to know what goes where.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

I think you should post your question here, where you may find some direct assistance with the specifics of the situation you find yourself in. You might just start off by copying your post here.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38

Put "[Mac, but not necessarily Mac specific]" in the topic.

Do I take it you emptied your Trash after deleting all that stuff?

Well, there's good and there's "bad" here: your files haven't been completely erased from your hard drive yet, they've been written for deletion by OS X, and the space they used to occupy is now considered as free space.

That's the good part. Now, on with the "bad" part: free data recovery software are few and far between, and what little such applications that exist out there have usually switched to be either 64-bit exclusive, or for Lion and above, or both (which makes sense, since Lion was the first version of OS X to go all-in with the 64-bit architecture).

The only one I found that's supposedly free is this one: http://www.softtote.com/data-recovery-free-for-mac.html

Worth a try in your case.

I saw your topic there so far without any replies. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2769761

You misunderstood my suggestion to put [Mac, but not necessarily Mac specific] in the topic. That should go along with the subject of the question, which, fully written, should be something like "Help needed to reassemble Profile from recovery software? [Mac, but not necessarily Mac specific]" It shouldn't stand alone as the entire topic, as this may put many people off from looking because of its vagueness.

I suggested putting that reference to Mac in the topic with that wording because when they see it's coming from a Mac user, the mods there will automatically put [Mac] in the topic question, which keeps many of the PC people from even taking a look at the post. And this question can probably be answered as well by the PC people there, who vastly outnumber the Mac ones. That said, there are several very knowledgeable Mac people there.

You can go back and edit that topic.

Since in its present form it may have been ignored, if it still gets no replies after a while you might want to give it a bump in order to get some more eyes on it.

FT: the OP already used data recovery software.

I don't have chapter & verse - hardly using Firefox...

but unless you find precise information, I would create a new example user with bookmarks etc etc & then compare the filenames/content that you have recovered, with 'real' ones from a working profile. It may then be possible to replace/rename so that (some of) the old content is available.

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/ seems to be the main location. It might help you to know how DR3 comes up with the names, since you may have files unrelated to Firefox.

Just thought of something else: RobertJ is probably the most knowledgeable of the Mac people there. You might want to add "Attn:RobertJ"

Here, anyway - bookmarks are in a series of files named in a fashion like this :

bookmarks-2013-10-22.json

the start of such a file viwed in Textedit of a hex editor is similar to this :

{"title":"","id":1,"dateAdded":137969060

It looks as if filenames have been lost, and DR3 is suggesting names based on content - so looking at the start & content of each one may be essential.

This is going to be a tough nut to crack. The really essential ones which I think the OP wants to restore, like bookmarks (places.sqlite) and passwords (signons.sqlite, along with key3.db--that one is text only) among other things, like formhistory.sqlite and cookies.sqlite are in .sqlite format. So no idea how DR3 recovers those, if it does, and what to do with those.

But one hopeful item possibly is the folder bookmarksbackups, which is populated by entries like bookmarks-2013-11-03_2535.json

Extensions can always be reinstalled. My Profiles folder has numerous items related to those.

2) There are files under misc called login-0001.keychain - Are these passwords, usernames?

3) Web Bookmarks - Files called Bookmarks00001.plist.

6) Some other files called DS_Store-00001, etc.

7) Also some files called embed.default.js.gz (under Archives folder and ZIP). I don't know what this is.

Don't think any of those are Firefox related. Don't think Firefox uses any .plist in Profiles. If there are any DS_Store, they aren't necessary or critical.

>>... like bookmarks (places.sqlite)...

places.sqlite is a 10.5 MB empty database here, even after expressly adding a bookmark.

bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2013-11-12.json on the other hand, was updated & shows the bookmark that was added.

Mine is also 10.5, but I can see they're all there from strings. Interesting that they're the same size, yours with only one and mine with thousands. I used to have to zip that when sending it by email to my G3 because it exceeded the 20MB limit. It seems it may now be using a different version of sqlite.

It is usually not a good idea to copy a places.sqlite from a newer Firefox version to an older Firefox version because the newer version may be using a newer version of SQLite and thus the places.sqlite database file might not be compatible.

Restoring a JSON backup (bookmarks-####-##-##.json) or importing an HTML backup should work.

Make sure the the file has the correct file extension (.json or .html) or it won't work and Firefox might complain.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/960206