How can i recover my old account syncing data? please help.
Hi, Today I've tried to log in with my FireFox account and I found out that I don't require a username to log in anymore instead I have to use my email now. Although when I entered my email and the password I usually use, I was able to access firefox with an account, but when its started to sync none of my old data or any data were synced with me on my firefox. I got terrified because I've been using that account on firefox for almost 5 years now and I have a lot of important data and information that was synced and stored to it, Like my passwords, usernames, emails, bookmarks, preference, etc. For Facebook and other famous site, I can remember my password easily, but for thousands or other account and password, they were only saved on this firefox syncing and is hard to remember each of them. I've register on a lot of website in this last 5 years and I rely on my Firefox syncing to remember all the password I enter and username. Also sometimes I use different username since I don't like using same username on every site. I also have 1,000+ bookmarks saved on my it and now since none of my old data were sync back I had lost all of them. They are site that I saved that look nice, helpful, cool, important, and needed for future reference. For the bookmark is ok to not recover them back anymore, but for my login information, they are very important and i really need to get my old syncing version or data back, Are there a way to get them back? Please.
The username I used to log in for firefox sync was jessbelow now I log in with my email ***@***.com and there's no option to log in with username. Also if i try to connect with syncing on the new version there's an option stating " Using an older version of Sync" and this bring me into an article showing me how to update to the new sync version by unlinking all my devices from the old sync, I don't know which devices still uses old sync and some of my device is not with me anymore.
edit: removed personal information for your protection. (philipp)
Okulungisiwe ngu philipp
All Replies (5)
hi jessbelow , if you are referring to just a username this means you were using sync 1.1 ("old sync"). mozilla has shutdown and decommissioned its old sync infrastructure and servers end of september - this was communicated in product and by announcement at https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/07/31/shutting-down-the-legacy-sync-service/ old sync data will be gone if you have not upgraded to new sync in time unfortunately!
however it is not yet clear from your question why you'd depend on sync to get to your old data. are you trying to migrate data to a new device this way? you were saying that you are using multiple devices - if you have your important data on one of those devices already, you should first take a manual backup of your profile folder there. and then you could migrate important data like described in Recovering important data from an old profile
philipp said
hi jessbelow , if you are referring to just a username this means you were using sync 1.1 ("old sync"). mozilla has shutdown and decommissioned its old sync infrastructure and servers end of september - this was communicated in product and by announcement at https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/07/31/shutting-down-the-legacy-sync-service/ old sync data will be gone if you have not upgraded to new sync in time unfortunately! however it is not yet clear from your question why you'd depend on sync to get to your old data. are you trying to migrate data to a new device this way? you were saying that you are using multiple devices - if you have your important data on one of those devices already, you should first take a manual backup of your profile folder there. and then you could migrate important data like described in Recovering important data from an old profile
Hmm I only used my old account to sync data on my laptop and a computer and the laptop no longer works. What I'm trying to do is recover all of my data from that old syncing firefox version because I wasn't able to saved them anywhere before the old syncing was permanently taken down. I have already created a new firefox account right now and is syncing my new bookmarks and stuff i surf on the webs, but the stuff i sync back then they weren't sync back to my new account and I don't know how to get them back. I'm using the same email and password just no usernames. I would like to find a way to get my old data back because they are really important to me..
can you still access the harddrive of your old laptop or have any other form of backup? there will be no way to recover "old sync" data formerly stored on mozilla's servers unfortunately - these storage facilities have been physically decommissioned.
philipp said
can you still access the harddrive of your old laptop or have any other form of backup? there will be no way to recover "old sync" data formerly stored on mozilla's servers unfortunately - these storage facilities have been physically decommissioned.
oh, Idk how to do that the laptop doesn't boot anymore but the hard drive is still inside and do i really need the laptop restore my files, can't I use this Pc instead because I created the account on this Pc and most of my syncing files were from here but I've reformat the data of this pc so many times whenever I update to a new OS window version or if my Pc wouldn't boot only factory reset solved it. Also that's sad that all the data has been deleted permanently, I was hoping there's a way to let the owner of the account files to be able to restore their data even if the syncing were updated to a new version...
first thing is to see if you can easily take out the hdd of your laptop (in many models the drive bay is easily accessible with the help of a screwdriver). after that you could try to build the old hdd as a second drive into your computer when you open its case - for example by temporarily using the cables that go to your dvd-drive as connectors... if in doubt you may also want to get this done by a local pc shop.
the important firefox data will be stored on the drive under \users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla - please make a backup of this location and afterwards refer to Recovering important data from an old profile.