HELP! Lost all of my synced passwords!

Storage & Syncing
#1

Hi guys! Needing some help here! The other day I was having issues with my laptop and had to resort to resetting the laptop itself.

I then obviously had to reinstall all my applications. Upon re-installing Firefox, i couldn’t remember my password (tried everything) and had to reset my password. There was a note stating latest saved/synced passwords may be lost, HOWEVER, I lost all of my passwords (at last 80 passwords to various websites).

Is there anyway of recovering these lost passwords?

Thanks in advance!

#2

Hi Siciliana

Thank you for your question about the Firefox Sync service.

It appears from your question, that you are using Firefox Sync as a back up service. This is not what Sync is designed to do. The Firefox Sync service takes a copy of the data you wish to include and transfers it to a second device (typically a mobile device such as a tablet or a telephone) running a copy of Firefox. The storage in between all attached devices is both temporary and fragile and is not stable enough to be (and is not designed as) a reliable backup service.

If you have a copy of your Firefox profile for desktop Firefox, you may be able to recover yourpasswords and other data. Please have a read of this article.

If you have a copy of your data on a mobile version of Firefox, please follow these instructions to connect it to Firefox Sync to copy your data.

#3

I just want to recover the saved passwords I had stored on Firefox. Is there anyway to do that? I only use Firefox on my laptop.

#4

I’m sorry to say, there is not. All the data stored on Firefox Sync servers is encrypted using your account password, so there is no way to recover the data that was synced prior to resetting your account password.

#5

That is real shame. I would not have reset my password if I knew this was going to happen. The message only stated that ‘recent’ data would be deleted. Not all of my 80 odd passwords. Quite disappointing

#6

For what it’s worth, I’ve captured your feedback here into a bug to review the clarity of this warning message, since it clearly let you down in this case:

https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-content-server/issues/6213

#7

Thank you. Still doesn’t help me recovering all of the passwords I lost. Might be time to switch over to Chrome

#8

Hi,

So my pc hard drive crashed, and the only back up i have is from 2018. I reinstalled firefox, did the whole copy key3.db and logins.json thingy and place in profiles, it did not work. So i downgraded to firefox 54, and viola, my passwords are back, but then firefox auto upgraded and I lost all passwords again. So i downgraded again, then this time synced all settings with my mobile phone. I have all passwords showing on my mobile firefox, but when i sync with the upgraded pc firefox, all come back (tabs, bookmarks etc), but not the passwords.

Please help!!!

#9

Are you using the “master password” feature on your mobile device? I recall that this may prevent it from syncing passwords and may be worth checking.

It sounds like the Firefox upgrade on the PC is somehow tripping up on the restored passwords files, possibly due to corrupting them. After upgrading, try syncing to a completely new profile (one that doesn’t have the key3.db etc copied across) and see if it can restore your passwords from Sync.