A cautionary tale
 

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

Don't panic!
I had something very similar happen to me a couple of days ago. First noticed it when I went to a site I use regularly and Firefox stores the password for that site (nothing radically important!) but this time Firefox didn't deal with it. I then found I had no remembered sites, log ins, passwords etc.
Looking in the profiles directory, the file "logins.json" had been renamed to "logins.json.corrupted" and was useless. Fortunately, I had copied the original file elsewhere and was able to just paste it back to replace the corrupted version and all was well. I remember this having happened some time ago and the answer then was to do a Windows restore back to date prior to the latest Firefox update. Then I copied the .json file.

I was prepared to blame it on an update, but the most recent one was a week ago.

Thanks for the tip KelvinD; I think I'll call the present arrangement a new start and move on from here. It's kinda therapeutic in a way, because there was quite a lot of stuff which was outdated.

Finally, in an average day's browsing, I would probably use up to around twenty sites, several of them multiple times - many of these require password entry each time. In total, there are probably about 50 or more sites which I use at some time which require password entry. For the financial ones I'm prepared to use manual entry on each occasion. For the others (including this one), I'm prepared to let technology work for me. Precautions are in place to minimise the risks of unauthorised access to same; I'm not at liberty to disclose what they are. I'm mostly comfortable with that :ok:.

FOR