Any idea what could have happened to profiles that seem to have disappeared from profile folder?
I wanted to experiment with profiles so I created a new profile called "temp". This seemed to work but when I tried to go back and reselect any of the older profiles I received an error message saying that this couldn't be done while any instance of Firefox was running (none were).
Also, when I opened the Profiles folder I only found the "temp" profile I had just created but none of the other, older profiles even though they were listed in Profile Manager.
I've lost my bookmarks and who knows what else. I did a search of my C drive to see if perhaps the missing profiles might have been located in a folder other than the profiles folder. I even did a search for .sqlite files. I did find some very old versions of my profiles that I had copied over from a previous computer but these did not have my up-to-date bookmarks. Any ideas? Seems crazy, I know. Thanks.
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Fetch me screenshot of the Profile manager.
Here you go. By the way, I renamed my temp file "Feb 2011" and is the current profile in use.
And here's a screen shot of the error message.
Firefox gets the info that you see in the Profile manager window from the file profiles.ini
If profiles listed in profiles.ini no longer exist on disk then you get the (misleading) message that Firefox is already running.
You can remove such orphaned entries by deleting the profile in the profile manager.
See also:
Thank you, cor-el, for this information. It certainly explains why I was getting the message that Firefox was already running.
I can see in my profiles.ini file (see attached image) the (4) profiles that also show up in the profile manager. The the question remains, what happened to the profile file, which I now believe was the "Richard III" profile, that was in use prior to my creating my "temp" profile (that I recently renamed "Feb 2011")? No attempt was made to delete the "Richard III" profile either with the profile manager or otherwise. Simply creating the "temp" profile seems to have blown the "Richard III" profile out of existence, leaving not a trace.
As you can see, the "Richard III" profile's path leads, as usual, to the Profile folder. But only the "temp" profile is found there.
One of the specified paths, the one for the "Richard" profile, leads to a folder that's not directly related to Mozilla. The "Richard" profile (which I used as bases for the "Feb 2011" profile) is a profile that's over a year old. I assume it became the bases, way back when, for the "Richard III" profile, the profile that's apparently vaporized.
I hope this makes sense even if the loss of the "Richard III" profile does not.
We are trying to figure out the problem. If you need the profiles urgent then you can try recovering your DELETED profile folders and files by Hard disk recovery software like Piriform Recuva(http://www.piriform.com/recuva).
Thanks. I am right in the middle of backing up a large number of big files (another 10hrs to go). I will try recuva when that's done and I am back at my computer.