Lost Bookmarks

My version of Opera updated automatically to 11.51 without my user permission and now I find, I have lost almost two months worth of bookmarks. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there some method to retrieve the bookmarks?

It depends on what actually happened to the old bookmarks.adr file. If the updating caused the storage location to be altered from where it used to be (such as a folder name being changed), the old bookmarks file may still be located in the old storage location and can simply be copied over to the new place... try a file search for it across your drive(s). Or check through any backups or image files you (should) have made in recent weeks. On the other hand, if a new default bookmarks file was written into the same storage location as before, the old file may well have been over-written by the new and be lost. Why Opera sometimes does this "out of the blue" is unclear. Perhaps it's an issue with Opera Link (if used), some type of installer glitch, or something within Opera that happens sporadically. In any case, there are a number of threads in the forums about Opera sometimes losing its bookmarks file, either during update or spontaneously at times. Hence frequently backing up personal data on a computer (from Opera or anything else you really don't want to lose) is vitally important to avoid the very situation you're encountering.

It may be useful to also understand that Opera has a number of files that it uses which, if it cannot find them during turn-on, at other times while running, or in some cases when being shut down, Opera will auto-magically create and save fresh default versions of the needed files. If an old file no longer appears to exist at the defined storage location because of apparent data corruption, a new version will be written by Opera and the OS over top of the old, usually causing the old file's data to be made unretrievable by the over-write.