Originally Posted by
FullOppositeRudder
Of course we all back everything up regularly don't we? Even so, it didn't quite occur to me to back up Firefox passwords on a regular basis. After all, it's a nice stable program - what can go wrong?
Well I found out yesterday. In the process of dealing with the overnight email, I flicked over to Firefox to check on a couple of details, and straight away it looked completely different. The was no tool bar, no bookmarks bar, or anything really familiar. In fact all I was offered was a "Let's get started with Firefox" screen ....
I was about to discover that none of my bookmarks were available anywhere; the saved logins, cookies, and history were gone too, along with the installed add-ons. It appeared that overnight somehow, the profile data had been corrupted - still not sure how or why - it seems that if the program can't find a previously valid profile dataset during startup, it creates a new one.
I discovered a profile folder which co-incided with the previous evening's shut down time, but I could not get it to be recognised. All the files therein were saved, and then copied into a profile folder newly created and named, but it refused to co-operate. After a couple of hours of this stuff, I realised that in the end it was easier to salvage the bookmarks from another computer which gets used less often but still had a mostly current set of most used sites. The saved passwords and cookies will be re-installed with ongoing usage, and reference to the hard copy list.
How did it happen? That's something I'm still somewhat worried about. SS HDD starting to fail? Apparently not. I ran the supplied manufacturer's maintenance program and it reported a happy device, 100% life remaining, 68% used, 583 days of operation and 14,008 hours of 'power on' operation (that was surprising!).
The moral of the story? Backups are worth the effort.
FOR
Back up passwords, for heavens sake, don't let a browser remember your passwords, that's one of the easiest ways to end up hacked