after my computer was taken into a shop to get fixed (geeksquad) my brave passwords were gone, they had to forcibly remove the password on my pc to gain access to it and now my passwords are gone, i have a backup of my brave folders. and this is only effected brave, edge still has all its passwords even though its chromium all the same, same thing with fire fox but im not sure how their passwords get encrypted. also i added a new password to my pc recently, and my old password stopped working a while ago, before taking it into the shop and before the issue even though im very sure i was typing it in correctly, before the issue ive been using my pin to sign in. my pin has not changed.
its on the most recent version of brave
That may be your issue. Passwords are encrypted based on your login credentials. So essentially you replaced the encryption key, which means passwords aren’t visible to you anymore. They are most likely still on your computer, just can’t be decrypted.
I’m going to tag in @privacymatters to see if perhaps they might be able to help a bit more on explaining this process. Guess I’ll also ask, do you have any other devices you use? I’m curious if you might have an active sync chain, which might just be able to replenish it all.
I do know eventually hoping the privacy team can have something on Help that kind of gives a better description on how passwords are encrypted on our devices and the things that can cause us to lose access to them. I know years ago, you could easily just replace the User Data and it would show passwords, but then I believe I saw posts that said they strengthened security so people couldn’t easily just lift passwords. But I’m not going to pretend to know for certain. So I guess let’s just wait and see if they can give some official answers.
ya, i still have all my passwords encrypted in the login data folder. the thing that puzzles me though is that this is only effecting brave and not my other browsers also not sure how relevant this is, but when i took it into the shop to get repaired they said they did a “browser cleanup” whatever that means, my history, bookmarks, and settings were still there but my tabs were gone. so not sure if they just existed out of the tabs i had opened or something more.
im wondering if maybe there is some way to decrypt sqlite files, or if brave themselves can help me with this somehow. and also my login data folder on brave, and edge both updated when added a password back to my pc. like i said edge is still fine.
also i never synced my data with any other devices sadly.
edit: forgot to mention ive tried decryption software(nirsoft) and it didnt work. it would display all other information besides passwords
@mikey_holt,
I’m actually unclear if this works or not but you can try changing your system login credentials back to whatever it was before you went to Geeksquad.
ill try it again, also just thought it was worth mentioning my computer is connected to a Microsoft account
ya i cant even do that and honestly i dont think it would work since the password i remembered was not working when this all started. i would always use my pin to get my passwords in brave. is there anything i can do from there?
also, i still know 2 of the passwords, could i possibly use that to work backwards and get the decrypt the other ones?
@mikey_holt,
they had to forcibly remove the password on my pc to gain access to it and now my passwords are gone
Because of this, your PC will not be able to decrypt your browser passwords. If I were to launch my Windows machine right now and do the same thing I would also lose my password data. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done here that I know of, other than potentially changing your OS password back to what it was originally before the GeekSquad service changed it.
No that is not how decryption works.
how does it work? is there anything i can do? because like i said changing my password does not work. and also id like to add again that my other chromium passwords are fine, and i would always use my pin to view my passwords not my actual windows password.
@mikey_holt,
Can you confirmed that you are signed in and Syncing your MS account with Edge? If so, this would explain why your passwords are still visible in Edge vs in Brave. While they’re both Chromium, if you’re Syncing with Edge, this means that the browser is able to retrieve that data from your account.
yes its synced with my Microsoft account. if i sync brave with my Microsoft account would i be able to get my passwords back?
Unfortunately you cannot sync your MS account with Brave. If you said that you’ve tried changing your password back to what it was before it was changed did not work, then I do not think there is any way to retrieve this information.
if brave added that ability would i be able to recover my passwords or no?
That’s unclear but it is highly unlikely we will include this feature
is there anyway i can get the passwords by trying to access them through a browser that is connected to my Microsoft account?
If all of your same passwords that were in Brave are present in your MS Edge browser, you can export them and import them into Brave — is this what you’re asking or am I misinterpreting?
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It’s as Mattches mentioned just above. Any passwords you have saved on Edge or another browser can be exported/imported over to Brave. As far as any passwords that you had exclusively on Brave, there’s no way to recover them unless you had it synced to another Brave browser on another device.
Keep in mind that this is in place so people who might steal your device can’t get your passwords. Such as if they had stolen it and then tried to bypass by doing what the shop did.
So yes, if you have passwords on another browser, then export them into a file and then import them to Brave. If you have another device with Brave that has passwords, then you can sync the two devices together. But that’s about as far as it goes.
thats not what im asking sadly, i was wondering if edge could read my login data folder, the one with all my passwords in it.
so there is no way to get the passwords back? what about when you just change your password normally? does that remove all your passwords too? is there anyway to update them so that they can be decrypted with your new password? i noticed taht every time i changed my windows password my login data folder would update immediately.
Unfortunately there is not.
Am I correct in thinking then that there were a significant number of passwords that you had in Brave that you did not have in Edge?