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Firefox has forgotten all my settings.

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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My pinned tabs are gone as are all the tabs I had open yesterday. This has happened before, and I do have an OLD profile saved, but I don't want to go back to last year!

My pinned tabs are gone as are all the tabs I had open yesterday. This has happened before, and I do have an OLD profile saved, but I don't want to go back to last year!

All Replies (4)

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Look on your desktop. Do you see a folder called; Old Firefox? Look inside. Look for the folder with the latest creation date.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible


Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link}

A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?

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Thanks, Fred, but there is no " Old Firefox" folder. I have copied my profile to an external drive and tried doing the whole rename and move back thing, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

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Did you try Firefox Safe Mode?

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You need to find a backup copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 in the profile folder to recover these (pinned) tabs.

You can look at this utility to browse System Restore points.

You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.


You will normally find these files in the sessionstore-backups folder:

  • previous.jsonlz4 (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 from previous session that was loaded successfully)
  • recovery.jsonlz4 (latest version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • recovery.baklz4 (previous version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)

You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file (make sure to backup the current sessionstore.jsonlz4).

You can use this tool from contributor jscher2000 to inspect a compressed sessionstore file.