I can't sync my bookmarks
Hi :) Long story short, my laptop broke and I had to reinstall windows and all my data got lost. When I installed firefox and synced nothing happened. In synced devices it's still showing that I'm connected (it's showing 2 devices for the same laptop). Is there any way that I can restore my bookmarks?
Isisombululo esikhethiwe
Hopefully you already have a computer that has that data on it. In that case, the first thing you should do is make a back up of your Firefox data BEFORE attempting to fix this issue. That way, you have a copy of the data to fall back to, if everything goes wrong for you.
First, to address the issue with both laptops appearing, that's normal. Since you didn't sign out of Firefox Sync before resetting Windows, Firefox has no idea that the device will never be used again. You can press the Disconnect button in the menu to remove the old laptop (I'm assuming the bottom on), but you may want to wait until you have the bookmarks moved over. It shouldn't make a difference, but better to be safe than sorry.
As for the missing data, it's not uncommon for this to happen if you had to reset your Firefox Account password to sign back in. In fact, that's what's supposed to happen because of the way that the data is encrypted and stored on the Firefox Sync servers.
If you did not reset your Firefox password, the easiest thing to try first is to sign out of Firefox Sync from the Firefox settings page and then try signing back in again. Depending on how much information you have to sync, it might take some time to sync the information and it might get stuck. Often times, signing back in gets that process going again.
If that doesn't help, go to the about:sync-log and see if there are any error logs listed there. If there are, open the log and then copy and paste the information there. It will probably be too long to post here, so I'd recommend using a free service like Pastbin.com to share it with us.
If you did reset your account password, you may not be entirely out of luck. Although that would make the data unrecoverable from Firefox Sync, the way that the Windows Reset tool (assuming you reset using that tool, not reformatting) works might save you. In most cases, there will be a folder called windows.old on your hard drive with old application data that Windows decided to keep. If you look in there, the Firefox folder is sometimes one of the things that Windows decides is worth keeping.
If you are able to find that folder, you can often use it to restore the data that you need.
Hope this helps.
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Isisombululo Esikhethiwe
Hopefully you already have a computer that has that data on it. In that case, the first thing you should do is make a back up of your Firefox data BEFORE attempting to fix this issue. That way, you have a copy of the data to fall back to, if everything goes wrong for you.
First, to address the issue with both laptops appearing, that's normal. Since you didn't sign out of Firefox Sync before resetting Windows, Firefox has no idea that the device will never be used again. You can press the Disconnect button in the menu to remove the old laptop (I'm assuming the bottom on), but you may want to wait until you have the bookmarks moved over. It shouldn't make a difference, but better to be safe than sorry.
As for the missing data, it's not uncommon for this to happen if you had to reset your Firefox Account password to sign back in. In fact, that's what's supposed to happen because of the way that the data is encrypted and stored on the Firefox Sync servers.
If you did not reset your Firefox password, the easiest thing to try first is to sign out of Firefox Sync from the Firefox settings page and then try signing back in again. Depending on how much information you have to sync, it might take some time to sync the information and it might get stuck. Often times, signing back in gets that process going again.
If that doesn't help, go to the about:sync-log and see if there are any error logs listed there. If there are, open the log and then copy and paste the information there. It will probably be too long to post here, so I'd recommend using a free service like Pastbin.com to share it with us.
If you did reset your account password, you may not be entirely out of luck. Although that would make the data unrecoverable from Firefox Sync, the way that the Windows Reset tool (assuming you reset using that tool, not reformatting) works might save you. In most cases, there will be a folder called windows.old on your hard drive with old application data that Windows decided to keep. If you look in there, the Firefox folder is sometimes one of the things that Windows decides is worth keeping.
If you are able to find that folder, you can often use it to restore the data that you need.
Hope this helps.