Firefox Community Forum

Firefox has exceeded all previous mess-ups by upgrading itself today (apparently sometime when my battery went flat and was then left recharging), and this happened despite my account being set for 'upgrades to be only installed manually'. Now every bookmark, all passwords and all the settings of my Home Page have been erased. I have no 'restore point' to resort to as supposedly all this info is synced to the cloud. But I can find no method to retrieve any of these files let alone one to restore them. This is a nightmare. Please help.

My old laptop crashed and I don't know how to access my old bookmarks and passwords.

Trying to go through SYNC did NOT help ... still nothing.

I need someone to help me figure this out.

I have reset/reinstalled Windows on this PC many times over roughly the past decade. Every previous time, I would reinstall Firefox, sign back into my Mozilla/Firefox account, enable Sync, and my data would come back: years of bookmarks, saved passwords, payment information, and other Firefox data.

I reset my PC again recently and did the exact same thing, except this time everything is missing.

Firefox Sync itself appears to be working normally. I am signed in, Sync is enabled, the appropriate categories are selected, and I can see that Firefox is syncing. The problem is that there seems to be nothing from my old Firefox data to sync back down.

I am also fairly confident that this is the same Mozilla account I have always used. This is the only email address I tested that behaved like an existing account with an existing password. Other email addresses I tried appeared to be treated as new accounts and asked me to create a password.

So I am not really looking for basic instructions on enabling Sync, manually syncing, checking the last sync time, or selecting which data types are synced. I have already gone through that.

What I am trying to understand is how an account that has successfully restored this same Firefox data after numerous previous Windows reinstalls can suddenly have none of that historical data available.

Specifically:

• Can previously synced Firefox data disappear from Mozilla's servers even though I did not intentionally delete it or disable Sync?

• Could reinstalling Firefox and signing into a newly reset/empty Firefox installation somehow cause the empty local profile to replace or wipe the previously synced server data?

• Are there circumstances where Firefox Sync effectively starts over with an empty dataset while continuing to use the same Mozilla account?

• Is there any server-side recovery, previous Sync state, historical copy, encrypted backup, or other mechanism Mozilla support can access when the current Sync dataset appears to be empty?

• Is there anything left to investigate on the old Windows installation/reset itself, such as a previous Firefox profile, Windows.old, recovery data, or another local copy, even if Firefox Sync no longer has the information?

• Is there any way to conclusively determine whether this account previously contained the missing bookmarks/passwords, rather than simply confirming that I am currently signed into the account?

The important distinction is that Sync is not currently “broken.” It appears to be syncing normally. The problem is that years of data that Firefox Sync had repeatedly restored for me in the past now appear to be completely absent.

I am trying to determine whether the old dataset may still exist somewhere, whether something could have caused the Sync dataset itself to be reset or replaced, or whether there is any remaining recovery path for the previous Firefox profile/data.

Hello,

after a rollback of my home system I looged into my Mozilla account to find out nothing synced over from the previous version that was installed on the same machine.

How can I recover everything (priority on passwords)

Best, Sebastian

Hello, I have formatted my laptop and downloaded firfox, but I'm not able to restore my old bookmarks and passwords after I signed in to my account and sync. Could you help me with this and thank you.

Hello if i backup my data on firefox account then i sign into new device then i again login my email and firefox acc then i did not got my passwords or bookmarks and history again. Then what's the use of that backup ? is that offline or online backup if offline then what if i reset my pc and then login back ? if online then there is no option to backup that data. Help me to get back my data.

Hello, Today I performed a factory reset on my laptop (Windows 11). Before i did that, I checked if my Firefox account has synced all it's data, bookmarks, history etc. was checked and I pressed "sync" button. Then performed all of the actions connected with factory reset of a windows including partition removal. After that installed Firefox, logged in, but had to reset my password because it wasn't saved within my Bitwarden. Then synced and it turned out, that there is no saved bookmarks on my account. Is there a way to return my bookmarks?

Best regards, Karol Picher

Hello,

I have a new laptop and I am trying to recover my old Firefox data. On my previous laptop, I had Firefox bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and other browser data. None of this information has appeared on my new laptop.

I have also forgotten the password for my Mozilla account. I tried to recover the account, but my bookmarks and other data are still missing.

Could you please explain how I can safely restore my bookmarks and saved login information?

My old laptop is [still available / no longer available]. The new laptop uses [Windows/macOS/Linux].

Thank you for your help.

I have a Firefox account I use as my default work browser. My organization's latest software updates forced me to re-install the latest version of Firefox. I specifically un-checked the box when installing that suggested clearing my settings and extensions, etc because I wanted to retain the way my profile was configured. When I logged back into my account, ALL of my settings, extensions, and YEARS of bookmarks I need to do my job have been completely wiped, and there seems to be nothing in my account that will allow me to recover them--the profile I've been using for year seems to have been completely reset, with all its history completely wiped.

Is there any possible way I can recover my bookmarks?? I did not create an external backup and realize that makes things harder, but I assumed my profile would retain its history as it was tied to an account I was always logged into.

Hi

I have been using Firefox mobile for many years. Recently I wanted to remove sone pinned websites on my home page. i was told the only way to achieve this was by using the desktop version as the mobile version did not support this action. i installed Firefox onto my laptop but on synchronisation it appears that the laptop has told the mobile that it is a new `setting` and not used the mobile as the `original`. I have now lost all of my bookmarks that i have collected over years on the mobile version. Can you suggest a way of restoring this and telling the laptop to use the mobile settings?

Regards

Paul McNeill

Hi, I'm pretty sure the email I am signed in with now is what was tied to all of my bookmarks in Firefox but I had to do an account recovery and I did not have my key. When I was able to sign back in and hit the sync button nothing updated.

I am really, really hoping I did not lose everything here... is there anyway I can recover my bookmarks/passwords?

Hi,

I assumed that bookmarks and passwords were tied to my account and that by logging in; I would sync them in automatically. I just reset my Windows 11 and had all files deleted.

I used to do this with Google Chrome, but now that I'm a Firefox user, resetting my PC and logging into Firefox after a fresh download, I have nothing? I cannot find anywhere to sync this back, do I have any hope or did I miss the opportunity?

I have always been logged into Firefox and I know that I had updated my bookmarks but recently I have re-installed my Windows and after logging into firefox all my bookmarks are gone. I don't have a html file and I can't 'upload' them manually.

I was hoping that they would be automatically updated after sign in... All I have are default bookmarks and the last 'sync' is showing today, which is after I re-installed Windows... Is there any way to get them back?

Any advice?

My impression is that everytime Firefox updates I loose my passwords and bookmarks. This happens on my windows and Linux computers. I believe that I'm not signed in to Firefox but not sure. Would not being logged in cause this problem?

I was signed in to my firefox account on my laptop, but then my laptop broke and cannot be recovered. I had my account set up to sync my data (i have email confirmation of this) so I signed in to firefox on my phone to retrieve passwords, bookmarks, etc. I reset my password to enter because I didn’t remember what it was (it was saved on the laptop). But none of my data appears on the mobile app. Is there a way to access my data still?

Being a weird person, I always saved my sites on my firefox browser and for my own reasons, hadn't bookmarked them and always kept them open on tabs to pick up and read at a later date, and as a result, racked up a lot of different tabs that were all very dear to me. However due to a catastrophic hardware failure a few hours ago I lost everything on my local files, including my backups of all the firefox tabs. I was hoping that if there was a remote possiblility that if the sync was able to record tabs, that it would also save all tab information from previous browser sessions.

hi. i change my windows and now I need to restore my old setting and bookmark to new pc but i have not any backup file i was thinking my account save all of my data & setting in cloud but now i cant access to my setting and bookmarks

what can i do? pls help me

Good afternoon, I restarted my windows computer because it was buggy and right before reinstalling I synced the Firefox account so that whenever I reinstalled Firefox in the PC once more I could have all my bookmarks.

Now while setting up, I find out none were synced? It doesn't appear and obviously I don't have access to the "old" browser to manually download the html file. This was weird because last time I downloaded Firefox in another device and logged into my account it automatically synced and configured everything as it was.

Please advice if there's any way to restore my bookmarks at least because I need them for work.

Many thanks. Kind regards.

i have been using firefox for like an year, found out now that the email i used for my account on my browser is wrong, the domain has a typo. Does it mean that now all my passwords are saved on a firefox account i cant even access (i have to still finish the setup, obviously i cant as i cant get a code in an email that doesnt exist) and that i cant remove it, ever? Does firefox sync up stuff on an account without the setup even being done yet? Or is the stuff just saved locally and im good with removing the account?