When I sign in to sync I lose most of my saved passwords
Since the end of August I have been fighting with Sync. I did a Firefox update on one of my laptops and it seems to have erased my saved logins. Since I have several computers it proceeded to sync the lack of passwords with all my other machines. I do have saved profile info from before the problem and so I pasted the profile info into the "new" firefox profile and all my passwords come back until it reconnects to sync and erases them back to where I started. I'm assuming that one of the machines I have is causing this. I've got 9 machines on the same sync. Any advice to help solve this would be appreciated. My bookmarks are fine and the usernames seem to be good. It's just the passwords. I saw a thread about AVG causing some problems but none of my machines are using AVG.
All Replies (3)
First, disable Sync on all devices. Second, reset your Firefox Account password to clear all saved data from the Sync server. Third, paste your saved profile as you did before; then connect that device to Sync using the new password. Fourth, make sure your passwords are getting saved / not deleted after a number of Firefox launches and exit events.
Then one at a time reconnect your other devices back to Sync using the new password. Make sure all the devices are connecting to Sync without data loss, with a number of exit events and restarts before moving on to the next device.
Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.{web link} I use an add-on that makes backups of my user profile, Just In Case. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with the current Firefox.
Every now and then, open the profile folder and create a copy of the current profile as is to another location on your hard drive. This way you will have a backup.
If you do this each day, you will not lose much data. This should be done with Firefox Closed.
Note: In case you need to restore from these backups, you may need to overwrite old or corrupted files.
I don't know what "Sync" is, aside from an option in the security settings in Firefox preferences. (I checked it, just in case it would bring back the lost logins.) Firefox, despite its promises that "refreshing" the browser would not erase my saved logins, did just that. The explanations on this forum are too technical for me, like the old outdated explanations to solve the problems by going to files under "troubleshooting" in the Firefox menu. I have also been signed up for "Lockwise" in spite of not ever intending to or doing it myself; consequently I don't know my password for that. One tab with the login page in Firefox preferences tells me to sign in with my password, the identical screen in another tab says I'm already signed in.
If anyone would care to list all the steps to recover my logins, including where each thing they're referring to is located, and what "Sync" is, if it's involved, maybe they could help me solve this without waiting for my tech support person to arrive in a week or two.