14 Feb 2025: Firefox and Thunderbird have lost all account settings and pages
Desktop PC running latest Thunderbird and Firefox. Started Thunderbird, instead of the usual tabs opening, it appears to have forgotten my accounts, asks for my email address, i.e. starting from scratch again. Starting Firefox, all previously-open tabs have gone, though bookmarks are all there.
Has there been some update which has wiped or reset Mozilla data? Yes, obviously I can go through setting up Thunderbird again but that will take quite some time and yes, I can use Firefox but many of the tabs I had open were there for a reason and it will take a while to find them all again.
Is there any way that the previous state can be recovered? My laptop has both applications running fine and I have paused Windows updates for a week, just in case the latest update caused this. Thank you.
All Replies (7)
You may be experiencing the issue described in the following article:
https://support.mozilla.org/kb/recover-user-data-missing-after-thunderbird-update
Thank you @DavidGG but that isn't the issue and looking at the one other profile shown did not restore things. The worrisome point is that both Thunderbird and Firefox lost data at the same time, which is why I thought it might be a Windows update issue. This is Windows 11 Pro, 24H2, OS build 26199.3194 Plenty of disc and storage space, 64GB memory.
Starting to reconfigure both applications now… :-(
@sfhowes Thank you but again that did not help. Bizarrely, having set up my two email accounts on Thunderbird again (IMAP, so all recovered after a while), it again reverted to the initial Set Up screen on startup this morning. This time I have uninstalled Thunderbird, reinstalled and set everything up yet again. I will wait and see if this proves stable. Meanwhile, having checked the "Open previous windows and tabs" in Firefox settings, it opened this morning with the initial screen with no previous tabs open at all, though bookmarks are intact.
Can *anyone* suggest what is happening here? My laptop, also running under Windows 11, is fine but my main desktop machine is the one with all these issues.
Do you have an app like CCleaner or Privazer that resets app settings to their defaults? If it is applied to TB, that has been known in the past to result in what you're seeing.
Addendum: some addresses have been lost from my address book(s), some are still there. Weird...
@sfhowes Yes, I do have CCleaner. That's been installed for about a year but never had any problems before. Worth a shot, I can do without it, so will uninstall and hope that might be the issue. Thanks for the suggestion.
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