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How can I recover my tabs and my old account. New account says I never had one (for 10 years!!!!)

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  • Last reply by FredMcD

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I opened my laptop and went to firefox as I have done for over 10 years. It was gone!! All my tabs are gone. I do payroll twice a month on firefox and my payroll tab is gone. When I put in my email they say I don't have an account.......... Is this the twilight zone?? I had critical things that I use for work on there. I am almost 70 years old. I can't reconstruct all of this!

I opened my laptop and went to firefox as I have done for over 10 years. It was gone!! All my tabs are gone. I do payroll twice a month on firefox and my payroll tab is gone. When I put in my email they say I don't have an account.......... Is this the twilight zone?? I had critical things that I use for work on there. I am almost 70 years old. I can't reconstruct all of this!

Chosen solution

I use an add-on that makes backups of my user profile, Just In Case. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with the current Firefox.

Every now and then, open the profile folder and create a copy of the current profile as is to another location on your hard drive. This way you will have a backup.

If you do this each day, you will not lose much data. This should be done with Firefox Closed.

Note: In case you need to restore from these backups, you may need to overwrite old or corrupted files.

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Sorry to hear about this problem. Do you recall any major changes to your system, such as a whole system crash, or a major Windows 10 update?

If you haven't already, you may want to do a normal system shutdown and startup to release any file locks and complete any pending updates.

If your Firefox data does not magically reappear, the most likely scenarios for complete data loss are:

(1) A Refresh started but the migration of data from your old profile to your new profile was incomplete, or
(2) Your old profile was locked, so Firefox ignored it and created a new one.

It's a lot of things to check, but if you go step by step, it's not too bad.

Did Firefox perform a Refresh?

Unless it was interrupted in progress, you should find a folder on your desktop named Old Firefox Data. Inside would be a semi-randomly-named folder with freshly updated files. Do you see anything like that?

If so, we'll suggest how to rescue key files or completely restore the earlier profile folder.

If not...

Does the Profile Manager list your immediately previous profile folder?

To check on that, inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.

This page should list all the profiles Firefox is currently aware of. If you see a profile that is not currently set as default that looks promising, scroll down to it and click the Set as default profile button below that profile, then scroll back up and click the Restart normally button. (There are some other buttons, but I think those are still "under construction" so please ignore them.)

Firefox should exit and then start up using the other profile. Is that the right one?

If it's not there...

Did Firefox orphan your old profile folder?

Here's how to check whether there are additional profile folders in the standard location in addition to the one you're using. Start by opening your current Firefox profile folder using either:

* "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
* (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
* type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter/Return

In the first table on the page, click the "Open Folder" button, to launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.

In the Windows Explorer address bar, click the capitalized word Profiles to move up one level in the folder hierarchy. More than one folder here by any chance? Do the files in those folders look like they were last updated around the time of the update?

If you've got any promising looking folders, we can discuss next steps to recover use of them.

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Chosen Solution

I use an add-on that makes backups of my user profile, Just In Case. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with the current Firefox.

Every now and then, open the profile folder and create a copy of the current profile as is to another location on your hard drive. This way you will have a backup.

If you do this each day, you will not lose much data. This should be done with Firefox Closed.

Note: In case you need to restore from these backups, you may need to overwrite old or corrupted files.