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Reset Firefox after a failed update and now lost passwords

  • 4 ŋuɖoɖowo
  • 5 masɔmasɔ sia le wosi
  • 20 views
  • Nuɖoɖo mlɔetɔ callwild

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After trying to update Firefox It would not work with a toolbar I require so I restored to an earlier time. This then lost all my bookmarks. I recovered the bookmarks but now all my passwords have gone and It seems my old profiles have also gone so I can not recover them as normally described. Is there any way to recover my passwords for websites?

After trying to update Firefox It would not work with a toolbar I require so I restored to an earlier time. This then lost all my bookmarks. I recovered the bookmarks but now all my passwords have gone and It seems my old profiles have also gone so I can not recover them as normally described. Is there any way to recover my passwords for websites?

All Replies (4)

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If you used the Reset Firefox feature, your old profile is still left intact on your computer, but it sounds like it didn't successfully take your old password with it to the new profile.

There is a tutorial that walks you through how to manually restore pieces of information from the old profile, but it's a little tricky: http://mzl.la/LHJo6V

Just out of curiosity, what was the toolbar that you required that no longer works in Firefox 14?

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Did you do a Windows system restore to go back to an older Firefox? How did you restore your bookmarks? Your passwords would be in your old profile so if that's gone they probably are too.

You can double-check for profiles with the instructions in this article - Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data

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See also:

Are there any profiles apart from the current default profile listed in profiles.ini present?

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

Note that a "Reset" creates a new default profile with a time stamp appended and tries to import some settings from the old profile leaving the old profile intact, including the (invalidated) cache folder (about:cache) that can take up to 1 GB.

Firefox 15+ versions will move the old profile folder to an "Old Firefox Data-##" folder on the Desktop that gets a number appended if you use reset more than once, so you can no longer use the profile manager to revert to the old profile.

It is best to first try some basic steps to repair your current profile folder instead of creating a new profile via a reset.

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I already was using FF14 and the toolbar (called UKSB toolbar) plus everything else worked fine. This morning FF did an automatic update and seemed to update me to FF15. When finished the toolbar which has lots of links I use for my business did not load and a message said it was not compatible. The only way I could find to return to 14 was to do a windows system recovery to a date last week. After this my bookmarks were not showing so I followed the instructions to find the profile and recover them. Somewhere in this process I must have reset Firefox and a new profile was produced. This was done at 9.25 and the bookmarks are all still there. however the key3.db file which apparently stores the passwords shows that it was modified after this at 9.42. So somehow I seem to have done something then which cleared all the passwords. can not remember doing anything except as I have said.