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Password file with a Primary password which has been forgotten

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Dead in water. Can the primary password be reset using the"Account Recovery Key"? And how without losing the encrypted data for all user names and passwords?

Dead in water. Can the primary password be reset using the"Account Recovery Key"? And how without losing the encrypted data for all user names and passwords?

Modified by NoahSUMO

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Robert, a local primary password and an online Mozilla account password are completely independent.

To make sure that we are talking about the same password, then the local primary password is what you would enter into the small "Password Required - Mozilla Firefox" dialogue box that can appear when you visit specific sites? and entering it results in the autofilling of that site's login fields?

If so, then as far as I know there is no way to recover or bypass a lost local primary password (short of brute force methods), and your online Mozilla account recovery information won't help here, unfortunately.

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If you use Sync then the logins stored on the Sync servers are encrypted with a key derived from the password of the Sync account just like all other data that is uploaded to the Sync server. On a desktop device you can use the Primary Password to protect the logins stored in logins.json in the Firefox profile folder. The only way to recover from a forgotten PP is having access to a copy of key4.db from before you used the PP.

If you have the logins on the Sync server then you can create a new profile and connect this profile to Sync using the same email address and password.

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