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Lost list of usernames and passwords

corinne -  
brucine Posted messages 25322 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   -

Hello,

This morning, I noticed that my list of usernames and passwords saved in Firefox has disappeared. A mini disaster, I have no paper trace :(

There hasn't been a system update as far as I can tell, and I haven't done anything special. Or is it the installation of a plugin yesterday that caused the problem (connective signing plugin to access a professional platform)???

Is there any place where my data might be stored? Following the advice from a previous discussion, I found the path Appdata>Roaming>mozilla>Firefox>Profile, but I can't find any folder or file where I could recover my passwords.

Thank you if you can help me, either on this lead or another

Corinne

4 answers

  1.
    brucine Posted messages 25322 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 193
     

    Hello,

    This data is in the key4.db and logins.json files of the profile, which are encoded, but if they don't appear, it's because they are empty.

    Check if Firefox hasn't created a new profile or a temporary profile; we could then copy them from the old one to overwrite those of the new one.

    External backups are good too; they prevent this kind of problem...

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  2. corinne
     

    Hello Brucine,

    Thank you for the information. I can see these files, but 1) how do I open them (file extensions .db) and 2) their last modification date is 08/22, will my latest password updates have been saved there if I manage to open them??

    Thank you

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25322 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 193
       

      You cannot open them.

      key4.db is fully encrypted and only contains the encryption key; it may be old; you can still open logins.json with Notepad, which is not very helpful, as you only see the website addresses, the rest is encrypted, it updates itself with the last modification (addition or deletion), today as far as I'm concerned.

      Your only hope is, as I said, that Firefox crashed for some reason and created a new profile: then you would have several, and it is in the others that you would need to look for these files.

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  3. Corinne
     

    Thank you, thank you. One last question please before closing the file: how can we know if a second profile has been created, and then how can we access it to retrieve my passwords?

    Note that my list of favorites is still there.

    Thanks again!!!

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25322 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 193
       

      You can see it (provided, of course, that you have chosen to show hidden files).

      In C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, instead of having a single folder xxx.default-release-nnnn, there are several: you then copy the 2 files I mentioned instead of those from the current profile.

      You can always check the other two default non-numbered folders, but they do not contain any user settings.

      What is curious is that the bookmarks list also comes from the same profile; it is restored directly from the bookmarksbackups subfolder (or read directly from the bookmarls.html file if you have chosen, and I recommend it, in the Firefox settings about:config to export bookmarks to HTML).

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  4. Corinne
     

    Hello brucine.

    I just checked, I only have one folder xxxxxxxx.default-xxxxxxxxxxxxx (without release) in Profiles.

    I think my list is definitively and mysteriously lost and I'm going to leave it at that.

    Thanks again

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25322 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 193
       

      Hello,

      Last hope (but I'm not too optimistic), they might be synced to an online Firefox account that you would have created, corruption of the NSS security module in the pkcs11.txt file, see here: https://forums.mozfr.org/viewtopic.php?t=149876

      or there might have been an unexpected intervention from a third-party security software that is also causing this (for example AVG): the logins.json file may have been renamed to logins.json.corrupt which we can recover by renaming it if it exists.

      In the future, remember to back up your data, including those.

      The ideal is an external drive, but we already have a security by partitioning our drive to create a second data partition.

      You can manually copy the Firefox profile, not great because you're bound to forget and it won't be up to date, or you can use a scheduled script or a utility (for example SyncBack Free).

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