Description of the issue:
I edited a certain file in my /etc folder which caused a major issue in booting my Asus laptop. Some malicious prankster fed me the wrong information on how to fix the booting issue which effectively bricked everything, every bit in my drive was set to 0. This includes a text file containing my passphrase, so I can’t sync up Brave anymore now that I’ve booted a new OS. I’m not particularly concerned about the BAT I’ve accumulated, I’m mostly here to request for copies of my previous bookmarks (preferably at two separate points in time because the older one was transferred to a text file which was also lost in the process). I am willing to provide all the credentials necessary to prove that I am the same person including which extensions I had, an outdated copy of my old bookmarks, the fact that I am posting from the same IP range (it’s a dynamic IP because I live in an apartment) and anything else which may be asked of me. I can respond here or through discord (my discord handle is Pooch#8447 though I will also require the moderator in question to provide credentials as well so that I am not giving the wrong person my information). Thank you.
If this was posted at the wrong category I apologize, do let me know where to correctly bring this issue.
Steps to Reproduce (add as many as necessary): 1. 2. 3.
This is not a report of a bug so there’s no steps for me to replicate, sorry. This is just a request for support.
Reproduces how often:
This question cannot be answered, sorry.
Brave Version(See the About Brave page in the main menu):
Version 1.49.120 Chromium: 111.0.5563.64 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Type of devices currently running on the Sync chain in question:
Aside from this one and the one I would like to have synced, nothing.
Additional Information:
None at this time, thank you.
Well. The data in the sync chain cannot be accessed by anyone. Not even brave. Highly unlikely anyone will be able to help.
Did you have it on a sync chain with another device?
Also do not ever share your contact info publicly. Please remove the contact info you have provided.
@JackSilver Do you only have the one device or did you have it synced with another? If you have a phone or something that was connected, you’ll be able to just sync from that.
In terms of your bookmarks and everything, that’s all just kept on your device and is completely encrypted where nobody but you can see it. None of the information is kept in an online account, meaning there’s no way to have Brave pull up the information and give it to you. It’s all “self custody” basically. While it passes through their servers, it does so in an encrypted format and they don’t necessarily know who it belongs to, only that it belongs to a particular sync code.
Also, nobody will contact you through Discord or anything. For you to share your handle will likely just result in scammers contacting you and trying to get you to provide information. There are a lot of scam accounts out there who are always trying to pretend to be from Brave and to request information and/or try to get you to make payments. So I definitely wouldn’t tend to include that type of information on topics like this.
Well, get your disk plugged in another computer and use a recovery software, as long as you don’t write/haven’t written in that disk since it ‘broke’ and you didn’t do anything, do anything that writes bytes in the disk, everything would be recoverable, of course the program has to be good and all that, depending what exactly you did with your disk might work or not, I don’t know exactly what you did, but unless you took hours to replace the data, then it will be there just the same.
It is the basic of how disks or any storage devices work, nothing you write in a device will ever be deleting again, the information once is written is meant to be forever in the disk, what happens is the data can get overwritten/replaced by other data, and that’s exactly what Shredding or Wiping a disk do, it only writes random data so files can’t be easily recovered, but it’s not doing anything magical, just ‘securely delete files’ by writing random crap on top of it and not just removing the file visually until it gets overwritten by some other data.
So get another computer, or a new disk to get your computer running, then plug your ‘bricked’ disk with a USB adapter or whatever way you can do it, don’t write anything to it, recover the information first and then do anything else to make it a workable disk again.
You might find the sync file, you could also find Brave’s User Data so you can get the bookmarks file since they are not encrypted.
I mean, you shouldn’t do advanced things like that if you are just taking random people’s advices into account, you should know what you are doing and not just copying and pasting anything in Terminal, especially Linux which is so open, you can brake things easily.
Understood, thank you to both of you for your responses. I suppose I lost everything since I’m already at the point where I rewrote everything on my device with a new OS. And don’t worry, I posted a dummy alternate discord account of mine.
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Well, still try to use a recovery software, try to download the program without a browser, and download it in a usb device where you can run it without using much your disk, if you have to use your browser, well, use InPrivate mode because it will use RAM for cache, instead of disk files = less writing.
it is still 1 little txt file, so that is harder to overwrite just by installing a OS, easier to recover, if you had more stuff installed before Brave, maybe the information is still there intact.
So use a recovery software in a USB portable if possible, and see if you can find it. I don’t know about Linux recovery file software but it should be similar to Windows where you might be able to specify folder to see if you can find it faster and specific. but if not, just give it a try since you are just looking for a tiny file.
It either works or not, but if you don’t try it, you won’t know.
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