Description of the issue:
Brave soft crashed and would not load any new tabs, it would just keep forever loading if I tried to access anything on any new tab, with any internet activity halting on existing tabs.
I have killed the process in Task Manager as that fixed this issue in the past and when I turned it back on, of my previous 3 profiles, only the one I was most recently on remained but with no autofill or password information left in it.
I navitated to AppData\local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\UserData and it only had default and Profile 1, whereas previously I had 3 profiles, the default one, a work one and one for my girlfriend.
The new default seems to have been the work one, the one I was on when it crashed.
I created a new profile and moved everything from Default into Profile 3 (I initiated creating a new profile in Brave, the folder appeared and then I closed down brave and then I copied everything from within default into Profile 3) and it seems to have restored my tabs, history and bookmark but no password or autofill information.
I’ve checked the forum for other similar situations and noticed the Login Data file is 544kb in size and when I edit it I can see all the websites on which I had accounts but the data is encrypted. From what I understand it’s encrypted to the same OS and user but I still am the same OS and user so maybe there is a possibility to recover the data somehow?
I really need access to my passwords. The passwords are still there, they just won’t be recognized by brave even though it should be able to decrypt the information, any way we can manually do so since I have all the ingredients necessary (ie same browser, OS, user) How can this issue be reproduced?
No idea, crash happened randomly
Expected result:
To make brave able to read my passwords again Brave Version( check About Brave):
[
Version 1.61.120 Chromium: 120.0.6099.234 (Official Build) (64-bit)
] Additional Information:
Hi @men220 - thanks for capturing your issue in detail. It’s comforting to know you already are familiar with where Brave’s profile folder is and you have looked there
Are you on a Work owned machine? ex: it’s joined to your companies domain (active directory, etc). If so and the company has admin privileges on the machine, they may be running software which locked you up. In some cases, the programs will try to uninstall for compliance.
Do you happen to have a program called IOBit Uninstaller? You can do Windows+R, type appwiz.cpl, hit enter. Look for it there. That is a known program that (for whatever reason) has classified Brave as Bundleware, because the browser has a VPN feature. I’m contacting them over X (Twitter) to get removed or at least challenge why it was added:
Please let us know. When you typically do an uninstall of Brave, there’s a checkbox Also delete your browsing data which is NOT checked by default. If checked, the code will delete the profiles.
I’m not aware of other code that would delete the profile. If you’re no on all of those, there are other guesses I have - for example, are you a gamer? Some anti-cheat software will look for and kill unrecognized processes. Any time the software is forcibly killed, there is unpredictable behavior. It shouldn’t delete the profile folders, though.
You can always open event viewer to look for more info. Windows+R, eventvwr, enter. There, you can go under Windows Logs > Applications and look for anything suspicious. You can also look under Windows Logs > System
Lots of stuff to check - please let us know. Thanks!
Brian
I own my own computer though I do use it for work, but I have no program that would do anything of the sort. I do have Bitdefender Total Security installed but I’ve had it for 2 years almost now and had no issues of the sort.
I also think there’s a slight misunderstanding. I still have the default files for the default profile still in the default folder, but when it happened and I just launched from the browser there were no profiles showing, as when you run brave for the first time, but running as what was previously profile1 in the folder.
I can confirm this since I created a new profile and moved the contents from Default to Profile3 and it restored my tabs, theme, history and plugins.
I do not have IOBit Uninstaller. I do play games but I wasn’t running anything other than work programs at the time (Office suite, ticketing platform in browser, a softphone and a VPN and RDP connection), no anti-cheat coming into play there.
I did find in the Application log an error for Brave and quite a few errors in Windows logs around the same minute, I have exported the log files but I can’t attach them here, hope wetransfer is acceptable.
Please let me know if I can offer any more information as I would really like to retrieve the passwords.