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My saved passwords are gone but they seem to still exist in my logins.json. How can I restore them?

rubystallion
rubystallion
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I am using the Chinese download of Firefox 33.0.3 with en_US language pack. Last week a Firefox update failed to install (first time that ever happened) and I just noticed today that I lost all of my saved passwords and now only have five new saved passwords in that list. However, if I go to my profile folder, which I guess is C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yth89kk9.default\, the logins.json seems to contain the encrypted passwords of a lot of those old sites I saved password info for. How can I restore these?

I am using the Chinese download of Firefox 33.0.3 with en_US language pack. Last week a Firefox update failed to install (first time that ever happened) and I just noticed today that I lost all of my saved passwords and now only have five new saved passwords in that list. However, if I go to my profile folder, which I guess is C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yth89kk9.default\, the logins.json seems to contain the encrypted passwords of a lot of those old sites I saved password info for. How can I restore these?

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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Firefox 32 and later builds store the passwords in the logins.json file in the profile folder and no longer use the signons.sqlite file that has been used before (the matching key3.db file is still needed). If you still have the signons.sqlite file used in previous Firefox versions then you can try to force Firefox to migrate the passwords saved in that file (you will lose passwords saved in Firefox 32+ versions). You can force Firefox to reimport the passwords from the signons.sqlite file and rebuild the logins.json file with these steps:

  • reset the signon.importedFromSqlite pref on the about:config page to the default value via the right-click context menu
  • delete the logins.json file in the Firefox profile folder with Firefox closed

When you restart Firefox then you should have the signon.importedFromSqlite pref with the value set to true and you should have the passwords imported in the Password Manager unless there may have been errors.

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

rubystallion
rubystallion Question owner
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Thank you for the reply, cor-el. I did as you said, and it's true that signon.importedFromSqlite again switched to true, however there are then no passwords in the Password Manager. However, a new logins.json file with many entries is created in the profiles folder.

I guess maybe a recent update corrupted my key3.db? How could I check that? And if that happened to be true, would there still be hope to recover the passwords some time?