Hello. A few days ago my pc has crashed in some kind of way. (black screens flicker, AMD errors and AMD software not working anymore.) Reinstalling AMD fixed it and I thought everything was restored, until I opened Brave. All of my passwords are gone and I have been logged out everywhere and can’t update Brave.
Forgot to mention. Windows 10, Brave 1.81.125 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
@DJzararadioEP I don’t think there’s going to be any good news for you. If it is only passwords that seem to be impacted then I think the issue is related to the encryption key. Brave’s official article on this is at https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/29808985123085-Sensitive-data-storage
The simple explanation is Brave uses your OS credentials to encrypt passwords. Sometimes when your OS updates or crashes, the keychain the OS uses for your credentials becomes corrupt or changes. Typically there is no way to recover the old encryption key after this change and there’s no way to bypass. In other words, you end up with a lock with no key and no ability to have a locksmith or anything take it apart. It’s permanently sealed.
How to check if this is your situation:
You can verify this is your problem by checking your Brave folders. If you go to brave://version you’ll see where it shows profile path. Go there on your device and you should see a login folder. The path will be somethng like C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default and you’d look for Login Data
Opening that either in SQLite or just plain Notepad will show you all of your accounts but the passwords and all would be encrypted, so look like gibberish. Basically it would all be like &Qp1C1f4cW3u6iZ7Z37puQBeiB1i6qBG1 or whatever.
What this means:
If that’s your situation where the login data is there but it’s not showing in Brave is the encryption key is lost and there’s no recovering. The only way you’d get your passwords back is if you had it synced to another device or if you have done a password backup by exporting bookmarks.
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