My profiles have vanished

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When I opened Brave, I received a pop-up saying that Brave had crashed, and it asked for permission to send a report to the Brave team, which I had accepted. Now, only one of my profiles is visible, and I am unable to view any of my other profiles, despite restarting my system. The startup window does not show up anymore, and the toggle near the search bar which normally allows me to switch between profiles has vanished. Going to Brave settings hasn’t helped either. All my other profiles seem to have disappeared. I’ve also tried going through Local app data, and I can’t find any Profile folders. Can’t find them in Recycling Bin either.

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Ok, now this is nightmare fuel.
I have 42 Brave profiles, all with their own tabs, accounts, bookmarks, settings, and extensions.

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@505 can you check the AppData/Local/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser directory again? You don’t see any directories labeled Profile [x]?

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@TypicalHog as a general rule just for your sanity, I would recommend making a System restore point right now and maybe schedule them to occur weekly. Whether you’re using Brave or any other browser/software – bugs/crashes/issues occur all the time. You’ll want to make sure you have everything backed up.

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Yeah. As soon as I saw this post, I copied my entire AppData/Local/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser directory to another drive.

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Keep in mind if you manually copy that directory, saved passwords may not be retrievable due to encryption. That’s why a system restore point is better, because it keeps the key backed up as well (which is built into Windows, and if you restore, or reinstall it manually, it breaks the trust with that key).

Just a friendly heads up. I found out the hard way once 7 years ago on Google Chrome itself.

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:backhand_index_pointing_up: Yes – came to say exactly this. You’ll definitely want to use a restore point or, if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, you can also manually back up passwords and bookmarks as files that can be reimported later.

Passwords: go to brave://password-manager/settings then Export passwords
Bookmarks: go to brave://bookmarks , click the overflow menu on the top-right of the page, then Export bookmarks

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Thanks, but I think this will suffice in my case. I use Bitwarden for passwords. Also, I have just 15 GB of free space on my system drive ATM, lol (probably not enough for restore points).

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Thanks a ton, you guys! I did, in fact, end up finding the Profiles in Local App Data (in a folder where it shouldn’t have been), and your advice really helped get my data back.

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Since I assume you didn’t move it, where was it?

Might be useful information actually.