How to recover information from old sync account?
HDD died on me, but I didn't think it much of a problem, as I just thought I'd pair the new installation with my android phone. However, I should have noticed much earlier that there are new sync accounts, and migrated to them. Now I can access all tabs, passwords and so on from my phone, but cannot pair them up with the new installation. And, while the old drive does allow some amount of reading, C: is completely untouchable, so I cannot do a normal backup and restore of the profile.
Now, to recover all that information, I have to load all 50+ sync tabs on my phone, then migrate to the new sync? Would that lose any information, like passwords or history? Is there any alternative?
Chosen solution
If you are using a new sync account now (FF 29>) in the new installation and had older sync installed in your windows machine then you need to install old Firefox again to sync. Also do note that sync requires you to keep both of the machine turned on at the same time. Is your Windows installation gone completely?
If you can still boot into Windows then I suggest following the steps in the article above to backup your Profile. Copy the backup to your new machine and restore there.
If you cannot boot into Windows then there may be a problem. If you have your recovery key then you can use that to pull down the information from Sync and get it onto your new machine.
Also You can't Sync between devices with the new Sync version and the old Sync version. You will have to update all devices to Firefox 29 or later to be able to use the new Sync, so you need to install a beta or Aurora Firefox version on the Android device as well.
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-to-update-to-the-new-firefox-sync
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Firefox-Accounts
- https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefox-sync/
All Replies (3)
Chosen Solution
If you are using a new sync account now (FF 29>) in the new installation and had older sync installed in your windows machine then you need to install old Firefox again to sync. Also do note that sync requires you to keep both of the machine turned on at the same time. Is your Windows installation gone completely?
If you can still boot into Windows then I suggest following the steps in the article above to backup your Profile. Copy the backup to your new machine and restore there.
If you cannot boot into Windows then there may be a problem. If you have your recovery key then you can use that to pull down the information from Sync and get it onto your new machine.
Also You can't Sync between devices with the new Sync version and the old Sync version. You will have to update all devices to Firefox 29 or later to be able to use the new Sync, so you need to install a beta or Aurora Firefox version on the Android device as well.
Windows doesn't even recognize the old disk, xubuntu helped me recover some of the data partition, but C: was completely corrupted. Tried my best there. Installing an old version of firefox did work, however, as I've saved my recovery key in a safe place. This way I've recovered bookmarks, preferences, at least most of my old tabs (not all, strangely), and, most importantly, the history, so I will just call this a job well done. Thanks for the answer, and for the tip about Android; that certainly saved me some headache before I figure it out myself.
Glad that helped :)