Labelled as "Firefox Sync" as it may be involved, as the only preserved data is seemingly what comes through firefox sync.
Hi all,
My C drive filled itself with 50GB o… (read more)
Labelled as "Firefox Sync" as it may be involved, as the only preserved data is seemingly what comes through firefox sync.
Hi all,
My C drive filled itself with 50GB of Crusader Kings 3 crash logs.
While the drive was (unknowingly) full, I opened firefox.
Firefox was...wonky...and instantly I could tell something was wrong, as my speeddial homepage was missing all the sites. My best guess is that, in the worst timing ever, firefox sync chose this time to sync.
I immediately cleared space on the drive, and restarted firefox. No extension data recovered.
I restarted the PC. No extension data recovered.
I began following Firefox troubleshooting steps, such as checking about:profile. Other profiles are present, but each lacks any extensions or extension data.
I widened my search with Everything, to search everywhere for any waylaid installs or profiles that may hold backups. Specifically, prefs.js, extensions.json, firefox.exe (incase I was somehow running a non-default install location) or any sign of other installations. I did find some hits, but none had extensions installed.
Perhaps useful, my FF profile weave folder is populated with many CORRUPT files, and the 'failed' folder lists addons, bookmarks, clients, extension-storage and prefs from it's most recent sync. Perhaps this is the result of trying to write to a full disk?
This is mostly an exercise of curiosity now, as the developer of Group Speed Dial (Juraj Mäsiar) helped me recover from their own backup system seperate from the Mozilla Preferences. I have an easy way to see if any backup file has the correct data, as I have many settings that are instantly visible.
Useful info:
Antivirus - None added (Windows Defender)
FF Version - 111.0.1 (64-bit)
Profile - default-release
(Moz Helpers, the remainder of this post is irrelevant, and purely to help future travellers)
If a weary traveller comes across this post in the future, I gift you my knowledge from the year 2023 of Group Speed Dial. At this time, the way you access the backups on your system is to navigate to the Group Speed Dial homepage. If you are on the default homepage, you should find the option to set it as New Tab or Homepage in Firefox settings.
Next, as you face the oblivion of an empty dialler page, click the Burger Menu (top-right for me) for the extension. NOT the firefox burger menu, the one as if you were clicking a menu in a website.
For me, the Fourth option is History/Backups. This is a new-ish feature from the developer, so don't be surprised if it move around...be they seem very proud of it, so I imagine it lurks somewhere!
If you just want to recover your extension list, at this time you can find a complete list of everything by examining extensions.js, extension-settings.js and extension-preferences.js. There is a tool online for helping parse into a human readable table, but I would not rely on it, and instead look into a generic JSON formatter to make the data human readable. The site is jeffersonscher.com, which has a extension file reader here https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/extensionsjson.html
Have a nice day all!
