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my addons are gone after syncing

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  • Last reply by hypnosnyx2

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1. i have firefox on my pc, now i installed it on my laptop 2. synced to my account on laptop 3. the internet went out halfway through the syncing process (only 3 addons or so installed and then it got stuck) so i closed my laptop and forgot about it 4. i opened firefox on my PC and the account synced 5. the addon bar flashed and all the addons except for 3 are now deleted (they are NOT disabled, they are completely gone from the addons page)

I don't remember the name of every addon i had installed but I need them back.

1. i have firefox on my pc, now i installed it on my laptop 2. synced to my account on laptop 3. the internet went out halfway through the syncing process (only 3 addons or so installed and then it got stuck) so i closed my laptop and forgot about it 4. i opened firefox on my PC and the account synced 5. the addon bar flashed and all the addons except for 3 are now deleted (they are NOT disabled, they are completely gone from the addons page) I don't remember the name of every addon i had installed but I need them back.

Chosen solution

Sorry to hear about that; Sync is far from perfect.

I don't know how to get your old list of add-ons back. I think your best shot would be to look for backup copies of the extensions.json file, from which you can extract a list.

Windows often makes backup copies of Firefox profile data when you do system updates, so you can use a tool like one of the following programs:

Note that you should set Windows to show hidden files and folders before diving in:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files-0320fe58-0117-fd59-6851-9b7f9840fdb2

Then within the most recent restore point 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\your.profile

If you find a recent extensions.json file, you can export it to your currently live desktop.

You can open that file in a tab in Firefox to see its contents (that won't install the extensions, but would be helpful for reference).

Alernately, I have a tool to extract its contents and list them out on my website here: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/extensionsjson.html -- that should give you links to their pages on the Mozilla Add-ons site.

Any luck?

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Seçilmiş Həll

Sorry to hear about that; Sync is far from perfect.

I don't know how to get your old list of add-ons back. I think your best shot would be to look for backup copies of the extensions.json file, from which you can extract a list.

Windows often makes backup copies of Firefox profile data when you do system updates, so you can use a tool like one of the following programs:

Note that you should set Windows to show hidden files and folders before diving in:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files-0320fe58-0117-fd59-6851-9b7f9840fdb2

Then within the most recent restore point 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\your.profile

If you find a recent extensions.json file, you can export it to your currently live desktop.

You can open that file in a tab in Firefox to see its contents (that won't install the extensions, but would be helpful for reference).

Alernately, I have a tool to extract its contents and list them out on my website here: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/extensionsjson.html -- that should give you links to their pages on the Mozilla Add-ons site.

Any luck?

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jscher2000 - Support Volunteer said

Any luck?

Hi, Thank you for your reply! I found almost all of the extensions manually, but I used your website to find links for all the addons I have installed so I can bookmark them for easier finding if this happens again!

I think I missed a few when trying to find extensions manually, but I hope I can just find them again when I need them!

Solved!