Description of the issue:
Hello there! I have a really big problem. I just had to see that all of my password are deleted. I updated my linux system yesterday, but didn’t notice anything odd. Apparently, it deleted all my saved passwords with it.
I’ve tried restarting my Brave and restarting my PC, but nothing helped.
I sadly don’t have a backup, so any help as to how to possibly recover the passwords would be great!
I know - I should’ve done backups. I definitely will in the future, that I have learned. The bookmarks and the history work fine.
How can this issue be reproduced?
I don’t know
Expected result:
Brave Version( check About Brave):
v1.80.115 (Linux)
Additional Information:
Operating System: Garuda Linux (Arch Based, KDE Version)
@Akero well, long and short of it is that if anything happens to corrupt OSCrypt. It uses your keychain to handle passwords. Often when people report it’s “deleted” as you are, they are actually still in the User Data folder but can’t be fetched due to the loss of the encryption key.
It’s been several years now and nobody has been able to pinpoint exactly what’s going on. They only are able to present a basic concept of something that might cause it. And what’s trickier is nobody can replicate it, nor are there any types of diagnostic logs to be able to run. It just seems to randomly occur to a very small subset of people.
You can also kind of see what I mean about it being ongoing for a while in below, as well as see the types of things they have said:
They are still in the User Data folder? How can I have a look at that? Is it possible to maybe recover them if I use a data recovery tool from there if they are gone?
Yes and no. It’s encrypted so you won’t be able to read anything. It’ll look a bit like gibberish such as: 4n9JHrRkxAqwdSsKxeGMO-0cv4Oyw081AbvWZW1qo6N8rVw==
You can go to brave://versionand you’ll see where it shows Profile Path. The folder Login Data would be in there once you open the Default area or whichever path for the specific profile.
The issue is, as stated, the encryption key. It uses your OS login credentials to unencrypt. But something broke where the key isn’t working. And there’s typically not a way to just plug anything else in to bypass the encryption.
Possibly. I mean if you have a system restore point you might be able to pull it and have everything viable. But it’s a roll of the dice. Generally thinking most people haven’t been successful, though I’ve seen the occasional person say they fixed things that way.
Ok. So the most important thing I get from here is: The passwords are still there. And last time the Brave team was able to recover them? So I don’t have to worry about installing files and possibly overriding the old password storage?
I have just upgraded to LM 22.1 xfce and I am having to re-install Brave Browser, which I do with the command, curl -fsS https://dl.brave.com/install.sh | sh . I find out that my configs aren’t in the right place since tabs and passwords are gone. I locate the backup of all ~900 MB of Brave config files and get them into the right place. Now I get all my active tabs back (and I assume history and bookmarks as well, haven’t checked yet). But the issue is passwords. Even though I entered my password upon starting Brave my password list is empty (I also notice that spell-checking isn’t working, maybe unrelated). So why are my passwords gone? What can I do?