Brave doesn't start when I run it as administrator and Brave Shield doesn't work

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Hi @rjeasy,

  1. The computer name I don’t care about too much. I change this sometimes. There’s no significance of the name. To me, it’s fine if somebody sees it :stuck_out_tongue:

  2. When I do a backup, I backup the %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data folder specifically. For me, I don’t use profiles. But if I did, this way is still capturing all the information (all the profiles are inside here).

  3. The sync phrase is an interesting one. There is a 25th word now where before it was only 24 words. The 25th word is time sensitive. That way, if your secret gets shared, someone can only join in a certain span of time. Kudos to @fmarier for this

  4. What to do to prevent this happening again? That’s a good question. Basically, anytime that you NEED to run as administrator that should be a red flag. For macOS or Linux, this is like running as root or using sudo for everything. That is not a recommended behavior and it can have dangerous consequences (if the app you run does something malicious). If you it only works when you are admin, that means there is a problem. In this case, it was permissions problem. It seems you either copied the folder from a different machine or you had another user account on the machine at some point. Windows has a record of this - which is held as a SID and it is associated with some of the files. If you have a way to verify your user account is the owner for all the files recursively and even better if you can remove that invalid account (it shows as Unknown account I think) then you should be in good shape. There is always a reason why something doesn’t work - switching to admin may have fixed the problem for a while, but now that Chromium has put preventive measures in place (because running as admin can be dangerous), the real problem is coming out and must be faced.

There are some key files I can share. This should help as you try to fix the problem.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Local State - this one has all the global settings for your browser. It can be quite important. If you want to inspect it, you can open it with a text editor. It’s in JSON format.

The profile specific ones - I’ll pretend we are inside:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default

  • Bookmarks - your bookmarks
  • Extensions - this folder has the extensions you had installed. Each extension is a folder with a crazy name like mlomiejdfkolichcflejclcbmpeaniij.
  • Extension Cookies - this could be an important one if you have installed extensions and you are logged into them. There is also a folder Extension State folder which might have valuable files (if your extension stored data).
  • History - your browsing history
  • Login Data - the saved username/passwords for this profile
  • Preferences - this is a JSON file which has your profile specific settings. This is an important file. Anything you changed in brave://settings would be in here.
  • Top Sites - this has the sites which show on the new tab page (ex: custom sites you added or the most frequently visited).
  • Web Data - I believe this is the Autofill data that is saved.

Sometimes, there’s one called ... for Account. That should be the same as the regular file but it means you used sync.

This is a quick overview - but it should help you locate what is important for each of your profile. Once you have backed up your profile, you can always move the non-working one (ex: %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data) out of the way (ex: rename it as %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data2) and then open Brave. It should look like a new install again and it should work. Then close Brave and copy the files one by one. For example:

Move the file %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data2\Default\Bookmarks into %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\ and when it asks to replace say YES.

You can create new profiles in the working one and move the files too. Nothing is lost - this is just unfortunate.

NTFS permissions can be annoying - I suspect there are some administrative tools that can help fix permissions… but I just don’t know what they are. I am pretty good at fixing the problems with Windows when it’s in front of me. I love Windows- but it’s like living with a crazy person sometimes. For Linux, you can simply use chown to fix this type of issue.