Option to tell Recuva where to install

I lost my Firefox bookmarks so I tried installing Recuva to restore them. I never did see an option of where to install it so it installed on my C: drive. This drive doesn't have much space left on it and it is where my bookmarks were. I could not find my lost bookmarks and I suspect that Recuva installed where they were.

Sadly you are probably correct in that assumption.one should never wrote to a drive one is trying to recover from. I take it you didn't have your bookmark synced with Firefox's inbuilt sync

This option is NOT needed.

At the bottom of the download page is a link to other builds

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds

This includes the Portable version which you simply unzip to any Drive / Partition / Folder that you wish.

Well, you still have to download it, and even if you stick it on a flash drive then the Piriform website will plonk a few more files on your drive whilst you're doing it. In these extreme cases you could:

In your browser clear temp internet files. This will release a variable amount of space and MFT entries and give you a bit of breathing space (I think this is a good thing to do in any recovery exercise).

Download and unzip Recuva portable to a flash drive on another pc, then move to the afflicted pc.

Running Recuva portable immediately creates a prefetch entry, and Recuva itself creates and deletes a 'random file' on the sys drive, so there's always something going on, even with portable applications.

I don't know how you could easily 'lose' FF's bookmarks, but I suppose it's possible.

I don't know how you could easily 'lose' FF's bookmarks, but I suppose it's possible.

So far as my Palemoon Browser (based on Firefox code) is concerned it has bookmarks in its profile which is located at

C:\Users\Alan\AppData\Roaming\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon\Profiles\

In actual reality it is located at

D:\Junctions\PaleMoon\Alan\Roaming\Pale Moon\Profiles\

Please note that Pale Moon is NOT a "Folder" but a "Junction Folder" or "Reparse Point" which links to the genuine "Folder" Pale Moon.

I did exactly the same thing with the slightly different paths used by Firefox, long before I was enlightened and switched to Palemoon.

The result is that an image backup of C:\ is not encumbered with browser caches that have no value.

Incidentally, CCleaner still cleans the caches which it sees as being on C:\etc and not at d:\etc

Open your Firefox profile, and you'll see a folder named "bookmarkbackups", in there should be several backups of your bookmarks.