Firstly, sorry to see that you are having issues with Firefox.

I don't believe that your data has been wiped from the system. It's likely still there. If anything, perhaps the file that Firefox uses to keep track of your profile folders (the folders where your browsing data is stored) has been damaged or reset.

If you are getting a menu asking you to pick a profile, but there are no profiles actually listed, the first thing to do would be to check to see if the profile folders are indeed still on your computer. This can be done by going to the folder where Firefox generally stores your profile folder(s).

The easiest way to get there is to press the Windows Key + R on your keyboard to open the Run dialog window. Then you should enter the following folder path (you can copy and paste, if you want), which should open the correct folder on your system:

%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

This should open a folder that has at least one other folder in it. These are your profile folders (they are usually random text with some label at the end, for example 2pq09vj2.Wesley is mine). If they appear, that's a very good sign. It likely means that everything you had before on Firefox is still there.

My suggestion would be to copy and paste these folder(s) onto a USB device or your Desktop so that you have a backed up copy of that information. That way, if something does go wrong in the next steps, you won't lose that information.

Once you've made a copy of the folders, the next step is to create a new profile. If the window that appears when you attempt to open Firefox doesn't have any profiles already listed, the aforementioned file that stores information about where your profile folders are on your computer is probably missing or damaged.

Sometimes creating a new Firefox profile will repair that. At the very least, it will get you back into Firefox.

Once you create the profile and Firefox opens as normal, your bookmarks and other stuff won't be there. The next step would be to go to the about:profiles page in Firefox. This page will show the profiles that Firefox can see. If there's more than one profile listed there, you may be in luck. That could mean that Firefox sees the old profile still on your system. In that case you can use the Launch profile in new browser button to find the profile that has your bookmarks and other settings and then use the Set as default button to make sure that Firefox opens that profile from now on.

If that page only shows you one profile (the new one you created), this means you will need to try to copy the contents of your old Firefox profile folder into the new profile folder you just created.

To do that, press the Open folder button in the Root directory row of that profile list page. That will open the contents of your current profile folder that you created. At this point, you will need to close Firefox in order to copy any files into that folder.

Now you need to go back to the copies of the profile folders that you made earlier (either on the USB or your Desktop). If you only had one folder to copy, that makes life very easy. You should be able to open that copied profile folder and copy/paste all of the files within that folder into the new profile folder that you created. If your computer asks you if you want to overwrite files in that folder, you need to let the computer do that.

I want to make it clear that you need to copy the files from your old backup profile into your newly created profile folder, not the other way around.

Then, when you open Firefox, your data should be back again.

If you have more than one profile folder that you made a copy of, it's going to involve a little more trial and error. You will need to copy the contents of one of the profile folders into your new profile folder and then open Firefox to see if the data has come back. If it hasn't you need to repeat the same step again with the next profile folder to see if that has the data in it.

If all goes well, one of the profile folders should have your old data in it and you should be back up and running once you find the one that has the data in it.

Hopefully I've explained everything clearly. If you do need any further help or some further clarification/explanation, please feel free to reach out.

Wesley, I tried the steps you provided, but no luck. When I looked at my profile folder after putting in the command name in the early part of this, a lot of the "date modified" dates were as of 4/28, the date I wrote this post and when it happened. This almost leads me to believe, there were no leftover files from when Firefox was running smoothly, only the files from when I made a new profile before reaching out on here. I should have probably done this first and threw more gas into the fire unfortunately.

I don't have a whole lot of time to try to recover what I had, so I'll just save my bookmarks from Chrome over to Firefox.

So there is no possibility that an update could have caused this "crash" to occur?

It's unlikely that creating the new profile on your end erased the existing data, so the outcome would have been the same even if you had attempted a recovery before creating a new profile. New profiles don't overwrite the old ones.

As for the issue of an update potentially causing this issue, it's a possibility, but I can't say I've seen it happen very often.

Glad to hear that you at least have some data from Chrome that you can use to recover some of what you had. It's certainly beats starting from scratch.

You may need to consult a backup you've made, or a snapshot Windows made:

How to find shadow copies

Please do not use the Windows Session Restore feature; that can lead to worse problems. However, you can use a utility program to look inside the snapshot data used by that feature and pull out interesting files. Here are the steps:

(a) Set Windows to show hidden files and folders:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14201/windows-show-hidden-files

(b) Download and run one of these two programs:

• System Restore Explorer: http://nicbedford.co.uk/software/systemrestoreexplorer/
• ShadowExplorer: http://www.shadowexplorer.com/

Within the recent restore points shown in the program, you can explore along this path to see whether you can find a shadow copy of your profile:

\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

Anything interesting here that you could export out for file recovery? Recovering important data from an old profile

Is there only one profile folder listed in this location?

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