I did a factory reset on my Windows 11 yesterday and lost my Brave Passwords and Brave Bookmarks. Is there anyway I can recover them from my SSD?
Version 1.75.180 Chromium: 133.0.6943.126 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Did you have brave synced to any of your mobile devices?
If it WAS synced you would just add it back to the previous sync chain and it would pull your passwords and bookmarks from your other device.
If you did not have sync setup to any other devices, and you wiped the drive that brave was installed on to reinstall Windows, which it usually does, you wont be able yo retrieve them. The privacy respecting portion of Brave means your passwords are stored locally on your devices, not in anyones “cloud”. You’ll probably have to do password resets and resave them.
I would recommend setting up syncing with at least one other device. Phone, tablet, etc…
Personal advice: if you are up for it, since your Windows was wiped anyway, setup a dual boot with Linux and a simple distro like Linix Mint. Alot of people think Linux is too difficult, and it can be, but I have NEVER had to re-install my Linux OS on any of my computers, servers, or laptops.
Windows, which is suppose to be more user friendly and “stable” I had to reset or reinstall like every 6 months and lose everything. I have 1 machine out of like 8 that runs Windows, and its only because I don’t want to re-setup my jellyfin server. Everything else is a Debian based or Manjaro Linux distro. Maybe even toss on a cheap SSD to put Linux on if its a desktop.
Good luck.
My brave was not synced to any of my devices. oops : (
Yeah the parts I used to build my PC for whatever reason are not able to run Linux well. This incident has convinced me to throw down a couple hundred on parts to build a new PC specifically for Mint.
Thankfully I think I can recover my one email account that is CRITICAL to me accessing all my other accounts.
@TerryTopelli your passwords would be as good as lost because I think the encryption key would be lost. Passwords are stored using OSCrypt, which you can see more on at https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/29808985123085-Sensitive-data-storage
Usually a factory reset purges everything. If you still happen to have any of your old \brave-browser folder from beforehand, then I imagine you may have your profile there which would contain your bookmarks and potentially some other settings or data.
Assuming you’re on here using the same device you just reset, then it would have overwritten a lot of files as part of the reset, but then everything you’ve been doing has also been having it overwrite. You could try to use something like Recuva or other file recovery software to see if they can find your older details on the device. But again, the chances are incredibly low.
Key aspect is you should always be doing some sort of backups. Export passwords or bookmarks ever so often in case something happens to the device. Perhaps sync with other devices so it can easily be restored if one of them goes bad. Or use 3rd party password managers and all which save your information on an online database that you can easily restore.
I know some people who, while they hate Google, will intentionally export their Brave bookmarks and/or passwords over to Chrome just so it will be backed up on Google’s end. Then they can always restore just by signing into Chrome and then exporting back to Brave. It’s at least one way of doing things since Brave is kind of silly on how they do sync and backups in general.
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