Brave updated and will not open

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1

Apparently Brave updated today while I was at work, when I came home my shortcut icon was a piece of paper and now brave will not open. I cannot go through the start menu to access brave, if I do a lot of right clicking on properties I can eventually open brave but it has dumped my email, all my passwords and any website I was signed into. Its like brave is partially wiped from my machine yet partially still accessible. It is very strange.

Description of the issue:
How can this issue be reproduced?

Expected result:

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Additional Information:

2

Please run Windows Defender - scan the whole computer.

If you have administrative privileges, the installed Brave Browser executable, brave.exe, is located in:

  • C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe

And, Brave Browser data - your initial, default user profile would be in the Default folder, here:

  • C:\Users[UserName]\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\

If you DO NOT have administrative privileges, the installed Brave Browser executable, brave.exe, may be located in:

  • C:\Users\Valued Guests\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\brave.exe

And, Brave Browser data - your initial, default user profile would be in the Default folder, would then be here:

  • C:\Users\Valued Guests\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\

(“Valued Guests” might be some other name.)

Where do you find brave.exe on your computer?

Please confirm, where your Brave Browser installation is, and state the paths.

3

Brave is not located anywhere on my PC when I look in the area’s you described.

4

I have found the user data folder however there is no application.exe anywhere on my pc

5

@fiberjuan,
If you go into your User data folder, does all the data appear to be there? For example, if you had multiple profiles, do you see directories named Profile 1, Profile 2 etc there? If you didn’t, can you go into the User Data/Default folder and look for a Bookmarks file and open it and see if it looks like the bookmarks you had saved in the browser are listed here?

6

The bookmarks folder is there and my bookmarks are in it.

7

@fiberjuan,
Can you please first make a safe copy of your User Data folder, then try going to brave.com/download and simply downloading and running the installer again and see if this resolves the issue?