How can I recover my bookmarks, history, profile?

Question

This is very frustrating.
I abuse my Firefox, it's true. I run upwards of 30 tabs on a regular basis and save most pages to my bookmarks.
What recently happened, is that upon starting my computer, my Firefox had no profile, no bookmarks and no history or download history - like it was an new install or something. I have so much important information stored up over years, so it's important that I retrieve my old bookmarks.
I usually just restore old sessions, so the last time I had used it, I just closed normally with an open session of 20+ tabs. I think for the first time, I had also sent in a crash log on that day. I had also installed a week prior to this screw up, an add on which allowed me to duplicate tabs. Of course, it isn't attached to the browser anymore.
Please help.

Answer 1

The first method returns an error.
The second method: there only seems to be one profile in appdata, and this is with everything unhidden. I can see some larger files, with a date and time which I last used when my browser/computer were in working order. One of these is an places.sqlite, size is around 82,000KB, a webappsstore.sqlite which is around 35,000KB. I opened the first one with wordpad and even though it's mostly nonsense, some of the text does make itself out to be sites I would have previously visited. Which corresponds to which and how do I import them? Also, if this is an new profile, why do I have old information in it?
For the third, I'm pretty sure there is nothing of the kind. Part of the problem, however, is that when I switched on my computer and the browser was wiped, many of the shortcuts were missing, despite being assigned to desktop if I went looking for their location.