• BUMP*

Thank-you.

"BUMP"

Thanks

First off, this forum is staffed by volunteers, and you asked your question on a sunday in the United States, meaning that a lot of people were off enjoying their weekend. Please exercise patience. In fact, "Bumping" your thread took it out of the "questions without a reply" list, meaning you actually slowed down the possible response you could have gotten.

Firefox Sync is not a backup system, nor was it ever intended to be one. It is designed to synchronize between multiple devices, not to restore a profile from Sync to a single device. While we may introduce a backup feature in the future, we are making sure we get Sync right before having people rely on it for backups.

You should ALWAYS have a physical backup of your Firefox profile if you wipe your computer. Did you save your data? If you did we can help you restore it.

I do normally, in this instance I didn't, for boring reasons I care not to go into...

Still doesn't really answer my Qn though; what happened, why didn't it sync, is the data still there in the cloud perhaps? Zero problems with Chrome.

I use Chrome to "sync" to just the one device* (for just that 1 particular acc't), I wish to use Firefox in the same way, are you saying it's not as capable in that respect.

Did it "not work" because it was expecting to see the original profile (which I lost) but instead was faced with a fresh one?

Thank-you/Bedtime.

• on occasion it might synch to ~1 other, but that's very rare

What happened is actually two things.

First, you reset your password. As the Password Reset Page says: "For security reasons, resetting your password will erase your Sync data from our servers. A new Sync backup will be created from your local browsing data. " https://accounts.firefox.com/reset_password

So if you reset your password, it wipes the Sync data on the server. You then hooked up your empty Firefox profile to Sync, which was blank.

Second, even if you hadn't reset your password, hooking up a blank Firefox profile to a populated Sync profile doesn't always re-download the Sync Data, sometimes Sync gets confused and instead wipes the Sync Data since it thinks you went and deleted all your data and you want Sync to do that too.

So, again, this happened because you wanted to use Sync as a backup service, which it's not, you reset your password, which wipes sync, and then you hooked it up to an empty Firefox profile, which probably wouldn't have worked anyway.

Sorry this happened :/ You can make physical backups of your Firefox profile Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles for the future, which is strongly suggested anyway, and hopefully we will include a dedicated backup feature in sync in the future (which wouldn't have helped in this case because you reset your password but at least it will help in other cases). If you had come to use before we might have been able to help but it's too late now.

Do you have the User Data for your machine from before you wiped it? You can possible recover your Firefox profile from there (Note that Windows 7 makes a backup on your C drive of all files on a computer before it was wiped)

Should be in bed...

I had no choice but to reset, I def. had the right pwd, but bizarrely it wasn't taking.

Sounds like if I hadn't needed to do that, I "may" have had a chance at pulling through, oh well.

I know how to backup profiles, but regardless, thanks for the link...

Complete reformat & install of Win, there's 1 spot I haven checked for backups, will do so later.

At this point though I may just manually reconfigure & install add-ons (& configure them).

There wasn't a huge amt done to this FF profile (it's my mother's)...

"and hopefully we will include a dedicated backup feature in sync in the future"

This, do it ASAP please, it really should be "part n parcel" of a "sync" service... I wonder exactly how Chrome's implementation compares, certainly in practise it's been pretty reliable for "backups", so far.

• UPDATE*

"You can possible recover your Firefox profile from there (Note that Windows 7 makes a backup on your C drive of all files on a computer before it was wiped)"

Now you jog my memory, not a heavy windows user, yes I think I know what you mean, I will check there too, thanks.

Night.

So, tried to restore a profile I found but no luck, any pointers on getting it working?

Also, can u elaborate on this: "You can possible recover your Firefox profile from there (Note that Windows 7 makes a backup on your C drive of all files on a computer before it was wiped)"

Thanks.

Anyone?

My last post was made well & truly before the weekend (UTC/GMT).

Thanks.

• BUMP*

Have you read Recovering important data from an old profile?

I don't have any more time to waste on this whole stupid thing. I'll just have to set-up everything again in their new-ish profile. One day, when/if I have time...

There is usually a Windows.old folder created.

The main Firefox profile folder is in this location:

• C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

There is also a folder for the caches in AppData\Local that isn't important, so do not confuse the two.

The "AppData" folder in Windows Vista and later Window 7+ versions is a hidden folders.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Show_hidden_files_and_folders

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:

• Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)

"There is usually a Windows.old folder created."

Alas I don't seem to have anything like that, I wonder why.

Okay I think I got it going, but when it syncs I think it keeps syncing what's on the server now, not what "was" there.

Hence it goes back to a relatively new/raw profile... >.>

How can I tell the server to use the local profile, instead of "pushing" what it has onto the local profile?

Nvm... Even the back-up I have seems to be a newer one, & not the way it originally was >.> And couldn't find "windows.old" anywhere, even after a broad search :-(