Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Corrupted logins.json and key4.db files

more options

So the other day I accidentally deleted the Mozilla folder located in the Windows appdata. This resulted in my saved passwords being deleted from my account. I reinstalled Firefox in the hopes of recovering my saved passwords through Sync, but that does not appear to be working.

Using a document recovery application, I was able to recover the logins.json and key4.db files which is responsible for storing the passwords as far as I'm aware. I logged into my account and placed these files in their appropriate folder, however this did not bring back anything. In fact, it created new problems such as me being not able to log out from Firefox, and not being able to store new passwords.

Now when I take a look at the file logins.json through a text editor, I can see the list of websites and encrypted passwords it stored in the past. My assumption is that one or both of the files are corrupted. Is there any way that I can revert back this corruption, or fix this problem in some way? The Sync was supposedly turned on, why did it not recover my passwords after a reinstall? Did my deletion of the folder resulted in my saved passwords being deleted immediately in the server side as well?

Thank you in advance for all the answers.

So the other day I accidentally deleted the Mozilla folder located in the Windows appdata. This resulted in my saved passwords being deleted from my account. I reinstalled Firefox in the hopes of recovering my saved passwords through Sync, but that does not appear to be working. Using a document recovery application, I was able to recover the logins.json and key4.db files which is responsible for storing the passwords as far as I'm aware. I logged into my account and placed these files in their appropriate folder, however this did not bring back anything. In fact, it created new problems such as me being not able to log out from Firefox, and not being able to store new passwords. Now when I take a look at the file logins.json through a text editor, I can see the list of websites and encrypted passwords it stored in the past. My assumption is that one or both of the files are corrupted. Is there any way that I can revert back this corruption, or fix this problem in some way? The Sync was supposedly turned on, why did it not recover my passwords after a reinstall? Did my deletion of the folder resulted in my saved passwords being deleted immediately in the server side as well? Thank you in advance for all the answers.

All Replies (2)

more options

You can open logins.json in a Firefox tab and check the file with the JSON viewer to see it is is valid JSON.

If the file is OK then there is likely a problem with the key4.db file.

Were the two files recovered from the same folder ?

Key4.db is a SQLite database, so you can possibly check this file in a SQLite viewing utility or online viewer on internet.

more options

You also could look for other copies of the two files in recent restore points. Do NOT use system restore as that probably will cause more data loss, but you can mine the files Windows stored. More info in this post:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1303393#answer-1347812