Hi Ponyone , I understand the frustration. However in the Desktop passwords manager has a show-hide password, where were the passwords disappearing?

Do no harm in this case would apply. There is no intentional slander here that I know of. I would be interested to see the exact steps taken to reproduce this as well since this was not something that I experienced when I synced my passwords between Firefox for Android and Firefox for Desktop.

To make sure passwords are still there try the sqllite addon and open up key3.db and signons.sqlite and back them up.

Hi, Thanks for replying... yes I am aware of the Show/Hide option. it is from the Password Manager box that all the passwords and all the sites they applied to including the chrome://weave... that I believe applies to the Sync account. The box was literally empty. I have been using this for years and never had a problem.

A couple minutes later I opened my laptop and on the Firefox on it, which is Synced with my desktop when I opened the Password Manager I watched as each site and password vanished one by one. Seriously... that's the honest truth. My assumption was that they were in the process of Syncing and my Sync account was the place where the Sites/Passwords had actually vanished from during the previous days exercise of attempting to Sync the Android version and never getting it to work.

I have had MozBackup on my desktops to backup my Thunderbird but had not seen a need previously to do this with Firefox. I have done this now and will do so in the future.

I had already checked the two files in the Firefox Profile and they both had times and datestamps which matched the time I opened them and the passwords were no longer there.

But I also want to say that the Firefox for Android was not very good for browsing. It did not properly render some sites and also did not properly run some site scripts (in particular one site uses a script for pics and this did not work at all yet worked fine on the Android browser and also on Chrome). Even on a couple sites I designed, it failed at proper rendering. Sorry... juts not up to snuff yet.

Hey PonyOne, we should be able to recover your passwords by using a neat Windows 7/Vista trick called "Previous versions".

You'll need to navigate to your Firefox profile folder and right-click the profile folder itself to see an older version of it. Select "Restore previous versions" on the folder, find a folder dated before this happened and backup/copy the entire folder to another location.

You can also just copy the signons.sqlite and key3.db files. You MUST copy both these files together as they are connected to each other. key3.db does the encryption and signons.sqlite stores the passwords. It may be enough to just copy the old signons.sqlite file and drop it in the profile folder since the key3.db file might not have changed. You can experiment with that to see if that works. I'd be interested to know if replacing key3.db with the old copy of it is not necessary.

Anyway, any other questions, just ask.

Also I'd be interested to know if you have the "Clear history when Firefox closes" option selected and if you have "Saved Passwords" selected as a choice within this option on either your laptop or desktop. You could have accidentally enabled this which would explain the deleted passwords.

Thanks for your reply and your suggestion... which was not as easy it sounded. With several devices I had to figure out which device was the primary one in the Sync. Attempted it first and yes, the passwords all came back. Then I synced the data and they all reverted to the ones that are a couple days old on my laptop. So I did the process again on my laptop and used the Sync in Options to Reset the Sync, it took a couple trys but I did get it to work and all my passwords are back... except for the new ones I created in the last few days (like on here LOL).

This was not easy and Sync seems to need some attention given the problems originated with the install and attempt at Sync with the Android version.

And, in answer to your question about the "Clear history..." first let me repeat what I said in my first post, I have used Firefox for almost 10 years. Yes I "Clear history when Firefox closes" and NO... with the thousands of times I have closed Firefox.... I have never had the Passwords checked off to clear.

I greatly enjoy using Firefox and most particularly the Sync feature. Just was not happy about the Android install/uninstall process causing all the problems with the Sync.

Thanks for your help. You may mark this as "Resolved" at your leisure.

Great! Glad I could help. :)

Just to clarify, it sounds like you were able to use my Previous versions trick to recover the password files. I'm just wondering if you recovered both files I mentioned or just recovered signons.sqlite?

And thanks for checking your "Clear history when Firefox closes" settings. I just wanted to be sure that wasn't the case so now we can look at filing a bug against Sync to get this problem reproduced and analyzed.

As far as the crazy syncing of old data, a Sync dev had this theory: I think the user probably has devices that have out of sync clocks. There's no concept of primary device, but there is a concept of timestamps between machines. Most recent timestamp can win, in unpredictable ways.

To allay any fears:

Even if we wanted to (and we don't!), and even if our operations folks were lax enough to give disgruntled devs access to production databases (they're not!), Sync's end-to-end encryption means we couldn't put deleted records in your account. Without your password, nobody can remotely delete your data.

If anything, this sounds like Bug 1024100. Take a look, see if it seems to match your situation.

Note that uninstalling Firefox for Android, because of the way Android works, won't touch your Sync account (even to the point of not cleaning up the server-side records for your phone).

We'd really appreciate bugs filed for any rendering issues you see on Android. CC me and include the URL of the page.

Thanks!