New profiles dissappeared after restart

I have been using old-style profiles for a long time, but they didn't work so well for me. The new profiles system was great - specifically that each one was a FF instance that could be opened and quit independently of any others (and most importantly had a different icon). I setup 5 or 6. But i quit all my FFs due to memory issues. Then after restarting a FF, it was an instance from the old profiles system and there was no profiles item in main menu (under three horiz lines top-right). Going to about:profiles didn't show them (as expected). I started from command-line to launch FF with Profile Manager and after selecting a profile that way, then there now a Profiles menu item. However it empty. I had a look and there is a ` ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profile Groups` that contains a number of sqlite files and each has a -shm and -wal file also. I looked in the profiles table for each of these. 1 lists all the new profiles I created and one points to default old-style Profile instance that opens (ie. Profiles/Main-Firefox-Window). about:config - browser.profiles.enabled is true I also noticed a browser.profiles.forceEnableRefresh but it appears to be undocumented. My question: HOW can I restore my new profiles? I put some work into icons etc.. and of course their history, so i don't want to have to recreate them.