@jputting,
I’d like to apologize again for the late replies and lack of real solution here. Nobody seems to be able to explain what happened here — other than potential data corruption of some kind during the backup/time machine process.
We’ve tested moving data this way from M1 → Intel macs and Intel → M1 macs both from Time Machine backups and just from machine to machine and we have not had any issues.
I’m going to do my best to ensure that the team continues to investigate this but it looks like you’ve already restored most of your profile at this point.
Indeed and my apologies. I was not being defiant, but many other tasks needed to be resolved first. Your solution looks fantastic and I hope that is the only directory which the third party attacked. I will need to discover how to do the same with my other browsers, Firefox, Opera, Opera Crypto and Safari.
My Time Machine has not been attached since I stopped using the computer 10 days ago. I did not want to risk vital data being overwritten on the TM. I have been doing intensive scans day and night with Bitdefender and indeed most problems were Windows files. It did not pick up the malware in the Brave folder. I occasionally used Malwarebytes before just getting Bitdefender and it too found nothing.
Indeed Mac is pretty safe and I do not regret my switch many years ago.
So, step by step I am getting there. Thanks again and if you happen to know the appropriate directories for the other browsers, do please let me know.
Thanks for your help to date, unfortunately nobody seems to know what caused this or how to fix this.
Brave is 90% restored after slowly, slowly piecing it back together bit by it from memory. I can live with that degree of restoration, as time goes on I will remember and restore more of what is still missing.
This was the only time I have not been able to restore Brave to a previous state.
But since Brave has been installed on my new Apple Silicon M3 iMac, I can restore it back to any state it has been in previously on my new iMac.