Lost all my data when I lost my password
I forgot my password, went straight to recover it, did not read the message and all my data is now erased. I know I should've read it but god damn if the action deletes ALL of your information do a double confirm with some red popup...
So is there a way to recover it somehow? Download and try my old passwords on it or something else?
Réiteach roghnaithe
Unfortunately, the data is not recoverable once the password is changed on the account.
When your data is saved on the Firefox Sync server, it's encrypted so that people cannot read that data. the account password is used to do that, meaning that the account password is required to decrypt the data again. If the account password is changed, it no longer matches what was used to encrypt the data, so that data can no longer be read.
The Firefox Account system has no way of knowing what the password on your account is, since the password itself is not actually stored on the Firefox Sync server in plain text. Because the old data becomes useless, it gets removed from the Firefox Sync servers.
If you have another device that still has the data on it, that's how you would recover the data, but unfortunately that's not a possibility for everyone.
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (3)
Réiteach Roghnaithe
Unfortunately, the data is not recoverable once the password is changed on the account.
When your data is saved on the Firefox Sync server, it's encrypted so that people cannot read that data. the account password is used to do that, meaning that the account password is required to decrypt the data again. If the account password is changed, it no longer matches what was used to encrypt the data, so that data can no longer be read.
The Firefox Account system has no way of knowing what the password on your account is, since the password itself is not actually stored on the Firefox Sync server in plain text. Because the old data becomes useless, it gets removed from the Firefox Sync servers.
If you have another device that still has the data on it, that's how you would recover the data, but unfortunately that's not a possibility for everyone.
Thank you for your answer, unfortunately that's what I guessed.
I managed to at least restore my bookmarks from .jsonlz4 file in Firefox profile folder. I immediately copied all the files from folders found via about:profiles page. Is there any other piece of data (like history) that I could look for or is it gone?
I don't think resetting your Firefox Account passwords affects locally saved data.
Any idea why your data was erased? Did you have a severe system crash, or a software update gone wrong, or some other scenario?