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Firefox crashed and now I have lost my profiles. How do I recover them?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Firefox 42.0 has been very unstable of late and crashed again. Once it finally reopened, none of my profiles existed and I had to create one to open Firefox. How do I recover my old profiles?

Firefox 42.0 has been very unstable of late and crashed again. Once it finally reopened, none of my profiles existed and I had to create one to open Firefox. How do I recover my old profiles?

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Firefox profiles are stored in the application data folder. To locate your old profile(s), please refer to the steps in the Mozilla support article to navigate to your current profile folder. Then navigate to the folder that profile is located in:

However, it sounds like your old profile may be corrupt or damaged. We recommend that you don't use the old profile, as it won't work if it is damaged. Instead, you can recover important user data to your new profile, by referring to this Mozilla article:

Let us know if you are successful or if you require further support.


If regards to your original crash that caused this whole issue, you may want to view the following articles for tips on how to prevent Firefox from crashing in the future:

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Do you have an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop in case you have refreshed Firefox and created a new profile?

You can recover data from such a saved profile, but be cautious to recover possibly corrupted files.

Note that "Reset" creates a new default profile with a time stamp appended to identify it and tries to recover settings like bookmarks and history and passwords and history and cookies and auto-fill data from the old profile, but you lose data like installed extensions and other customizations.

The current profile folder will be moved to the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the Desktop.