Password recovery from old ssd

i had an old laptop that unfortunately stopped working i had all of my passwords on my brave account and since i made it back in high school i have forgotten the passwords because i had them on autofill every time
i am trying to recover my passwords so i plugged in my old laptop’s ssd which has brave on it and i can find the login data but i cant seem to access it

@Abdulsamea Yeah, you’re out of luck there. Passwords are encrypted. If you can’t boot up the SSD, then there’s no accessing the passwords. Only hope you’d have is if you have a second device you’ve synced with old, in which point the passwords would be visible there.

And encryption uses your device password and other information to unlock it. This means even if you moved all the files from SSD over, I don’t think it would be able to bypass the encryption and show your passwords anymore.

There used to be ways to unencrypt it, but supposedly the method stopped working after Brave made some changes (I’m assuming to make it safer). I’ll tag @Mattches here just in case Brave has anything they can suggest to you, but pretty sure you’re just going to be out of luck overall.

NOTE

You should always have a backup. For example, you could have exported passwords and kept it on a secure drive that you locked up somewhere or whatever else. Or as I mentioned, having multiple devices synced helps to make sure info survives if one gets broken, stole, or whatever.

i can boot up the ssd and have plugged it into a new laptop
would this help?

If you can plug in the drive, if the files are intact and if you have the Windows Profile password, you should have no issue copying the Brave data files (located at %LocalAppData%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data) that contain your passwords to another drive/computer.

i tried this but unfortunately it only gets me back my bookmarks
and some of my history None of the passwords

@Abdulsamea,
As @Saoiray mentioned, even if you can access the password files, they were encrypted based on your old OS password from the laptop that is now broken. If you can boot up the old SSD, you might be able to boot from it, install Brave again and open it and have access to your passwords, but I’m actually not sure if this will work either.

I would also recommend making a safe copy of your User Data folder just in case.

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