Description of the issue: Got a new computer which is on Windows 10, installed my old harddrive which was on Windows 7 as a slave drive to the new one, got it booted up just fine, but when I accessed Brave, it didn’t recognize my old profile, bookmarks, and more importantly, passwords. Thinking “okay, it’s probably because it’s in E: Drive now and it’s looking in C: instead, I’ll just copy over all my old files.” Did so, booted up Brave, got all my bookmarks… but none of my passwords, nor my extensions. Go to settings, and get told that some files were changed, implying that it was corruption caused by other programs, and so it reverted a lot of things and gave me the option to reset EVERYTHING to basic settings, which I obviously do not want to do. I did see one other post about a somewhat similar issue that mentioned that those sort of files are encrypted to the old account and that can fail, so I’m really hoping I’m not SOL here; I had a LOT of stored passwords there that now I cannot recover, that I can think of. Is there any way I can get some help with this? Mid-writing update: Went to check version, and get this error as well as version number: “An error occurred while checking for updates: Update check failed to start (error code 3: 0x80040154 – system level).” I’m guessing it stems from the same issue with copy-pasting over my old files?
How can this issue be reproduced?
Copy Brave files in Appdata/Local and Appdata/Roaming from E: Drive
2.Paste in those locations in C: Drive
3.Get told that they’re corrupt and have no extensions or passwords, only bookmarks, but otherwise browser works.
Expected result:
Copy Brave files in Appdata/Local and Appdata/Roaming from E: Drive
2.Paste in those locations in C: Drive
3.Have access to all old files under old account.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Version 1.38.111 Chromium: 101.0.4951.54 (Official Build) (64-bit)
“Thanks for all the good questions. In short, this is where backup & restore stands:”
The official way to “back up and restore” is basically to verify your Rewards wallet with Uphold/Gemini. When you do so, the BAT that’s stored in your browser (as local files) is transferred to your Uphold/Gemini account. So, as long as you log into your Uphold/Gemini account on your new browser installation, you should see your BAT balance again, since verified users just use the BAT from their Uphold/Gemini accounts.
If you are unverified, your BAT is basically local data on your device. If you reformat your computer, for example, you will lose your BAT. However, you can back it up by copy-pasting the /brave-browser folder, which contains basically all your Brave browser profile data, including unverified BAT.
Regarding “Users manually backup (copy/paste) and restore their user profiles to new computers (restoration fails as we could not decrypt the wallet as each instance of the wallet has its own decryption key)”, we made some changes recently that makes copy-pasting like this much more reliable, so users can do it if they are tech savvy, and if they are otherwise out of options. (In other words, that line is slightly out of date, will probably be updated, but is still somewhat relevant given not all users have updated.) However, it is extremely important that users do this properly: first by making sure their browser is updated to the latest version of Brave (brave://help), and then completely replacing the /brave-browser folder on a new installation. Failing to perform those steps can lead to all kinds of unexpected behavior. Still, this is not the officially supported path, so there are no guarantees.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try. I’m not worried about BAT since that’s a feature I’ve never cared about; I just want my passwords and extensions back, really.
Welp, I’m still getting the same issue. “Some settings were reset
Brave detected that some of your settings were corrupted by another program and reset them to their original defaults.” This is just from trying to copy and paste it over. All my passwords are gone still, as are my extensions (though the files are still there, because of the way that they’re anonymized when added I can’t just read what their names were and grab them all over again easily).
As I mentioned in the OP, bookmarks are the sole thing that did transfer over. My passwords and extensions, however, did not, and those are the more important things.
Did… Did you not read the actual post you’re citing? This is for recovering lost Bookmark files using RECUVA to un-delete them (since until those bits are overwritten they are still that file, unless you use a shredder deletion program that writes garbage data over what you delete then deletes that as well to deliberately kill recovery efforts, eg. for sensitive documents). I have all these files, and the install worked just fine when it was installed in my previous computer. No damage was incurred, and I’m sure if I put the drive as my main with it running Windows 7 again I’d be able to access it all just fine. Brave simply isn’t properly recognizing them because it’s a new machine with a new user, I’m pretty sure. TL:DR; They weren’t ACTUALLY corrupted, it’s simply because it’s now my secondary harddrive in a new install and it won’t recognize things when copying them over.
Still an issue. Is anyone from Brave actually going to address this, or is this only the typical hands-off ‘support’ where it’s just other people in the community?
Otherwise, find an exact match model of your older computer, and install your older hard drive, therein.
Or, get the old computer fixed.
So you can properly export the passwords that you stored in the old Brave Browser Profile. You might export the passwords to a .CSV file, according to @CerealLover.
