Safari Bookmark Deletion

[Giovanni]

Hello,
I use Safari 5.0.6 on Mac OS X 10.5.8, and today my Safari bookmarks disappeared for no apparent reason. I am posting this thread to inquire whether it is possible to restore them into existence.
By yesterday and by a long while beforehand, I had created maybe 10 or 15 bookmark folders and accumulated around 500 bookmarks dispersed throughout the 10 or 15 folders. Today, when I turned my computer on and opened Safari, I found that my saved bookmarks were completely missing and replaced by what seems to be Safari's default bookmarks bar (Apple, Yahoo!, Google Maps, etc). There is no evidence of my bookmarks in my "Trash" and when I open Finder and go to Macintosh HD>users>gcr>Library>Safari, I find that the document titled "Bookmarks.plist" was created today at around the same time I turned on my laptop.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened when was I using my laptop yesterday. It died last night when I was in the middle of watching a youtube video without my charger plugged in, and that was the last thing that happened to it before I powered it on this morning. But this has happened plenty of times without me losing any bookmarks.
At this point, I have tried force quitting Safari, clearing my history, and emptying my Safari cache. None of these have worked. I have not tried resetting Safari.
Please, if anyone has any ideas on how to restore my bookmarks, let me know... Again, I had around 500!!!!

 

[Giovanni]

A couple of things I forgot to mention: I use a four-and-a-half year-old Macbook Pro. No, I have never set up Time Machine and I have never exported my bookmarks.

 

[Kaveman]

It sounds like the changes you made were not saved when Safari we down

You will need to use file recovery software, there is no magic switch that will get them back.

Backups are a must, especially on a Hard Drive that age! This might be a symptom of a bigger issue with your drive, back up now!

 

[Giovanni]

Thanks very much for your reply. I didn't realize that there was such thing as "file recovery software," so I'll look into that. Also, I'll be backing up more diligently, for sure.
However, I think there might be a misunderstanding. Your suggestion that the changes were not saved makes it sound like I created all those folders and added all the bookmarks at one time. That's not the case. Sorry if I was unclear. In fact, nearly all of the bookmarks and folders that I lost were undoubtedly saved when Safari went down last night (some of those bookmarks had been saved for over a year). For a long time now, I've been using Safari, adding bookmarks, quitting the program, and opening it again to find all my bookmarks there without any problem. It's just that today they're suddenly all missing, and my Safari Bookmarks.plist file is all of a sudden less than a day old.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Just to add, for file recovery to be truly effective, you have to stop using your Mac immediately … as this prevents the overwriting of the files that you hope to retrieve.