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Lost persona and start page(s) settings.

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  • Last reply by Xircal

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Problem: After a computer crash, my persona was lost, along with my start pages settings. I am not missing any regular bookmarks or other settings (none that I can detect, at least), just the persona and start page(s) settings.

Profile Manager detects only one profile, and in the %APPDATA%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folder there's only one active (recently changed) folder. I.e. there are no other profiles.

Problem: After a computer crash, my persona was lost, along with my start pages settings. I am not missing any regular bookmarks or other settings (none that I can detect, at least), just the persona and start page(s) settings. Profile Manager detects only one profile, and in the %APPDATA%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folder there's only one active (recently changed) folder. I.e. there are no other profiles.

Chosen solution

I did the same thing with Personas and it took me ages to find the one I had before. I've made a note of the name of it now so that I can find it again easily.

If you can recall the name of your own favourite, use Google to do a search for it. For example, mine is called "Carbone" and this search string found it: Personas solid "Carbone"

It's the one at the top of the list.

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You might be able to recover data from the old profile if it's still available. See: Recover important data from an old profile and Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles

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As there are no alternative profiles, and no information on the "Recovering data from an old profile" (regarding start page settings and personas, specifically), I'm still having an issue with finding the data. Thanks a lot for the quick reply though, I very much appreciate the effort!

The reason for me being persistent is that I would like to avoid browsing through all the personas to find the one I had, and that a few of my start pages had really messy URLs, which I, quite frankly, can't remember.

I know I've failed in not taking regular backups of the folder, but this was not an event I was expecting.

On another note; while looking through some of the files, the "Invalidprefs.js" contained information about the persona I used before the loss of it, and also what other personas I had installed. (Names, descriptions and URLs) It was also changed around the time of the crash. However, no start page settings info is contained within it.

Modified by PeTTs0n

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Chosen Solution

I did the same thing with Personas and it took me ages to find the one I had before. I've made a note of the name of it now so that I can find it again easily.

If you can recall the name of your own favourite, use Google to do a search for it. For example, mine is called "Carbone" and this search string found it: Personas solid "Carbone"

It's the one at the top of the list.

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I did it the hard way, I looked through the "Invalidprefs.js" file for the persona - found its ID number (13378), and voilá, after some brief Google work; http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/13378.

As for the start pages I had, that was easier; I looked through my browsing history and looked up a date and time I restarted the browser (I rarely do this, as I require it on pretty much all the time), and found out which entries I had as start pages.

Will definitely start taking backups of said settings and other FF data though. Thanks again for the replies!

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You're welcome.