I haven’t touched my PC in 3 weeks, after coming back I find that I’ve been logged out of literally everything and that all my passwords have been wiped. I’ve consulted LeoAI to see if there’s anything I can do and they haven’t given me any helpful suggestions. They suggested syncing (the “Sync Now” feature isn’t even a thing anymore), importing a csv of old passwords (which I don’t have), and uninstalling and reinstalling (which I did, nothing changed).
Looking at User AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default, I do have a login data file but it’s encrypted and I can’t paste it back into Brave. I’ve been perusing through old threads and there’s nothing useful indicated other than just waiting it out for Brave Admin to post a fix to the bug.
I asked Perplexity.ai to decipher those commands. The reply:
Those three commands are working together to take control of the Brave Browser profile folders and reset their permissions for the Administrators group.
1) takeown /F ... /R /D Y /A
takeown /F C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser /R /D Y /A
takeown – changes the owner of files/folders.
/F <path> – target folder: here it is the Brave-Browser folder in your profile.
/R – recurse into all subfolders and files.
/D Y – automatically answer “Yes” to any confirmation prompts when access is denied.
/A – make the Administrators group the owner (instead of just the current user).
Effect: Administrators become the owner of the entire Brave-Browser tree under that user profile, including all subfolders and files.
/setowner Administrators – explicitly sets the owner to the Administrators group.
/T – applies to the folder and all subfolders and files.
Effect: Confirms and enforces that Administrators are the owner of everything under Brave-Browser (similar goal to the first command, using a different tool).
/inheritance:e – enables permission inheritance so items inherit ACLs from their parent folder.
/T – recurse through all subfolders and files under BraveSoftware.
/C – continue even if errors occur (skips over problem files, keeps going).
Effect: Re-enables normal inherited permissions for everything under BraveSoftware, so permissions flow down from the parent instead of using only custom/blocked ACLs.
Overall purpose
Together, these commands:
Make the Administrators group the owner of the Brave Browser data folder and all of its contents.
Ensure that ownership is set consistently using both tools (takeown and icacls).
Turn inheritance back on for the broader BraveSoftware folder so its permissions are normalized and inherited from its parent, which can fix “Access denied” and permission corruption issues within the Brave profile.
Well, you can paste it in but won’t do you any good. Problem is you lost your encryption key. This is an issue occurring with Windows DP API overall, which is what is used for encryption within Chromium browsers.
If you’re using Sync, often won’t have many problems as it just pulls the passwords from the sync chain and adds them to the new encryption key you have.
And this is happening on Chrome, Edge, and others as well. It just doesn’t come up as often on those because they try to force account sync to the browser profiles as part of their data collection mechanics. It’s a pros and cons kind of thing.