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Description of the issue:
Routine upgrade to 1.84.141 on desktop/windows deleted all saved passwords.
Been using Brave for years, and last night, after a routine upgrade due to a system restart, all passwords gone, no entries, no passwords, Login Data empty.
If I didn’t have chrome’s old profile i would be starting from zero.
How can this issue be reproduced?
No because it happened during an upgrade.
Expected result:
Don’t delete saved passwords when upgrading. Also why doesn’t Brave backup key items like this during an upgrade so if something goes wrong there is something left of the profile to recover from. Or at lease have an option to backup the previous profile.
Just to confirm, when you said upgrade, was this a Windows upgrade or a Brave upgrade? Brave upgrades don’t require a restart, but Windows updates can.
I’m wondering if a Windows update borked the Credential Manager, causing Brave to be unable to open its encrypted database, thus creating a new one. I’ve seen a few people run into this, but I have yet to personally see it happen.
If it was a Windows update, try and state as much as you can/remember for Brave developers. Sadly from what I’ve seen, unless you backed them up, there isn’t an easy recovery (I mean there’s always a way, but encrypted files are harder to re-assemble if clusters are lost), but what we would like to do, is stop it from happening again, and maybe see if there’s a trend with others.
Some questions I’d have: Any UEFI updates? (I doubt related, but Windows 11 is so engrained in TPM these days that Credential Manager could be related to it). Changes to Windows user password perhaps? (This can also alter the credential manager).
(There’s more I’d want to ask but can’t think of them right now.)
IF you use any other Chromium based browsers that have saved passwords as well, like Chrome, Opera or Edge, did they too lose their passwords? (If not then we know something Brave specific happened, but if they did, then Windows messed up).
– This restart happened during a Windows 10 upgrade (ESU) but there was a queued up Brave upgrade waiting to happen at the same time. The Brave browser was open when Windows decided to restart the machine.
– Not sure who borked what, I’ve been using Brave on this rig for a long time. Since Dec 2020. First time I’ve seen this.
– All I know is a Windows 10 ESU update KB5072653: Extended Security Updates (ESU) Licensing Preparation Package for Windows 10 rebooted the system at 8am on the 21st Nov here, and everything else on the system (including an open chrome and edge and opera browsers) all came back to life, this was the one thing that showed up due to the reboot.
– I’d consider offering an option to backup the profile periodically. I have a add-in that backs up tabs, last 80 backups on the hour - would be handy if brave had an option to backup important bits on a schedule.
– No UEFI updates on this machine - its been done with firmware updates for a long time now. Bitlocker off, no encryption, TPM off, secure boot off. Windows user pw not changed.
– All other browsers were open at the time, opera, chrome and edge all open and they came back ok. I restored my passwords from chrome - thank goodness those were still around. Chrome 142.0.7444.176, Firefox 145.01, Opera 125.0.5720.0 all open at the tim of reboot as well.
Somehow I missed your earlier reply, I’m so sorry about that.
But your reply just now gave me a clue, I think the file is corrupt if it’s hanging like that.
Try this, open file explorer, and in the top bar, type in %localappdata% (this brings you to a hidden folder in your user directory where apps store their preferences and in Braves case, cache, bookmarks, saved passwords, etc).
Then navigate to BraveSoftware>Brave-Browser>User Data>Default
Look for Login Data:
First, let’s compare sizes. Mine has many saved passwords in it, and is 132KB in size. Is yours as large or larger?
Now, here’s where I’d wait before proceeding in case anyone says this may break things further. But I would suggest moving this file to your desktop, then relaunching Brave (make sure Brave is closed before moving it). It should generate a new file. Does it now save passwords instantly? If so, this file was the cause somehow.
But I say wait, because I don’t know if moving it, and forcing Brave to make a new one, would break the link to this old one, if at all the file’s passwords are recoverable.
Problem here is when I got into the new session where most of the old profile worked (eg, bookmarks, history) except the passwords, Brave made a new empty Login Data.
So by the time I noticed it was wrong, Brave had done whatever to the old Login Data and made a new one.
Brave should warn if its recreating parts of a profile if they are missing or corrupt.
I would be happy to try and recover a borked file, but Brave just blows away the old one it seems if its corrupt or whatever.
Ouch, ok so you already noticed this file was new.
I do agree personally, good UI should warn the user something is wrong, so if we wanted to at least take a stab at it we have that chance before it just nukes the old one from orbit.
But if you’re still having a hang when saving new passwords, and it already just re-created it, I honestly might recommend deleting the “new” Login Data folder, so it is forced to make a new file.
(I think, and I don’t know for certain, when it can’t read a file, instead of deleting and making a new one, it just erases it, so messed up permissions stay, messed up. But deleting the file and forcing recreation fixes permission issues generally.)
@mickrussom and @MasterLink just an FYI, this has been an ongoing thing for a long time. To give the short version, this is said to happen on all Chromium browsers. It’s not felt or seen much on Chrome because of how it automatically syncs and pulls everything to the “cloud” (Google account) for the most part. So when the encryption key on the OS get corrupted, Chrome is able to just shift the passwords to the new key using the account.
Brave is a bit of an oddball in this area. They do have sync we can set up, but it’s not as natural and isn’t really “account based.” If a person had their device on a sync chain, then the issue isn’t really experienced as it works like the others. But if you’re not using it and just keeping the password stored locally, once the corruption happens for whatever reason, you’re kind of screwed.
But this has been ongoing for years now, with topics dating back to at least 2022. Then the official topic that had been opened here in 2023, NOTICE: Unexplained Data Loss Issue.
If you have more than one device you’re using, this works pretty well. It just would pass through the sync server and be kept there. Then kind of work like how Chrome and others do the passwords on the back end. This way it’s always available. But this lumps everything together, so if you’re doing multiple profiles you’d have to do multiple sync codes.
Otherwise the only thing available is just to do a normal Export Passwords and save it somewhere, but this isn’t encrypted and would just be a plain text file. So if you did this would have to keep it somewhere fairly secure.
I mean, you could always use a 3rd party password manager like BitWarden, 1Password, or whatever.
I just got hit with this again. Another scheduled upgrade. This time it reverted to an older password database. Let me be clear on this - this time when the issue happened I ended up with the password database in the state it was in before this whole fiasco started. That is odd. This is really getting old. I have to export all passwords every upgrade to defend against this. I cant believe Im the only one this is happening to. Simple upgrades now are causing data loss. Who is “in charge” when stuff like this happens, I’d like to chat with them.
now i have to manually export passwords before every upgrade
this is not happening in chrome, opera, firefox, this machine has ECC and almost never crashes, i get 3-6 months of uptime and only restart for updates, never crashes.
this is also plugging into a UPS so there are no power outages causing crashes either.
someone needs to take this seriously. i log a ton of hours with a ton of software on this machine, and this is the only application that is deleting user data.
