Is it possible to recover the entirety of my data linked to my Firefox profile in my online Firefox account?
Hello :) I know the subject might sound a bit vague so I will try to be more specific in the following.
Unfortunately, I have recently lost the full content of my Firefox profile that is usually recorded in the Application Support folder on a Mac
I had a lot of pages and tabs opened at that time and I would really like to recover all of these data if possible.
Since I cannot access to my sessionstore/recovery/bookmarks/prefs files (etc.) anymore, I would like to know if Firefox would be able to recover theses files in its database provided I had a connected Firefox account to it when it happened? If so, could you please explain me where I could find these data on my account?
Besides, could you think of another way to get to the same result knowing that I don't have a recent clone/time machine backup unfortunately?
Many thanks for your potential help!
All Replies (7)
Hi
Thank you for your question about the Firefox Sync service.
It appears from your question, that you are using Firefox Sync as a back up service. This is not what Sync is designed to do. The Firefox Sync service takes a copy of the data you wish to include and transfers it to a second device (typically a mobile device such as a tablet or a telephone) running a copy of Firefox. The storage in between all attached devices is both temporary and fragile and is not stable enough to be (and is not designed as) a reliable backup service.
If you have a copy of your Firefox profile for desktop Firefox, you may be able to recover your bookmarks and other data. Please have a read of this article.
If you have a copy of your data on a mobile version of Firefox, please follow these instructions to connect it to Firefox Sync to copy your data.
Hi Paul, Thank you for your answer :)
If I understand you right, registering a Firefox account online is only useful if we want to use the Firefox sync service to access our current Firefox to another device? I thought that kind of online account was more of an online database gathering all our personal data regarding our daily use of Firefox tbh (a nice addition to our personal profile recorded on our desktop)...
If that is correct, I understand that I won't be able to find such files in my online account unfortunately, yet I'd like to know if there would be another space/area/website related to Firefox where we could find all our personal data recorded by the browser, and possibly choose some to recover them.
In other words, is there another way to access my personal data/files like sessionstore/recovery/bookmarks/ect than my personal profile recorded on my desktop by any chance? Is there an online database where Firefox is recording all of our personal data where we could select specific files to recover them please?
As you probably understood, I don't have a copy of my Firefox profile recently lost and never used the sync service for the mobile version of Firefox unfortunately, hence my different questions ;)
Many thanks again for the help you all could provide to solve this tricky problem!
Gewysig op deur prvt.mailing
Hi
Firefox Sync is not an online database - it is designed around transfer of bookmarks, user credentials and other data between copies of Firefox.
Your data is on your devices - Firefox is not storing it in the cloud.
Did you already try connecting a new installation of Firefox to your Firefox Account to see what you get back? Mozilla does not -- as far as I know -- provide other ways to access Sync data data besides using Sync.
You can install the About Sync extension in Firefox 72 and newer on desktop to check what data is stored on the Sync server via the about:sync page provided by this extension.
Close and restart Firefox to access the about:sync page added by this extension (see the about:about page for possible about pages).
Hey guys, Thank you for your answers and new suggestions, really appreciate your help :)
Great to know about this Sync extension, never heard of it before but I'm sure it will prove super useful for my future handling of this service ;) Regarding the suggestion of jscher2000 , I tried to install a brand new Firefox and connect it to my online account, but it just makes me start from crash => so no progress for my data unfortunately...
Yet I'm still wondering: Would there be a possibility that, if I could enter the exact full name/numbers of my Firefox profile somewhere (where???) -- a profile that I used for so many years and which was for all that time directly connected/linked to my online Firefox account in addition! -- a smart IA or mechanism could lead Firefox to recognize me as the proper user linked to my specific profile and then grant me access to a kind of a backup of my data that the browser surely must have somewhere I presume?
I mean, If my Firefox activities and files have been linked to a specific profile name/number for so many years, an algo or even a human (if possible) should have no difficulty to identify me as the proper owner of that profile and therefore could let me access to my personal data to recover the ones I need ideally.. That would be wonderful if such a thing could be implemented somehow!
Ps (specific to master jscher2000): Since you gave me a nice yet completely unexpected opportunity to exchange with you directly by answering my tricky situation, I just would like to take some extra time to send you my warmest and deepest thanks & congrats for your awesome website => https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html that saved my life more than once in the past and that is still the most essential tool for a smooth Firefox in my humble opinion ;) The bitter irony is that I obviously should have used it a bit more often to prevent such a crash, with hindsight :p/:s
Thanks for everything anyway!
Thank you for the great review!
The thing about a Firefox Account is that it isn't linked to a specific profile, it is intended to allow you to cross data over among any number of profiles, pooling the data together. It is only linked to your account password.
By the way, you didn't say how you lost your profile. Did you already check the About Profiles page to see whether it is still listed there? Here's how:
Inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.
This page should list at least one profile and could list many. (Each profile has two folders and one or more buttons. Do not use any Remove buttons!)
The profile that Firefox is currently using will have this:
This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted.
Do you have any other profile(s) listed on this page? If so, you can check whether it is the one you were using recently by clicking its Launch profile in new browser button.
If it isn't what you want, simply close that new window.
If it IS what you want, back on the about:profiles page, click the Set as default profile button for that profile so Firefox uses it automatically at the next startup. Or you could move data over manually.