Hello folks, it would seem I’ve fallen victim to a bug that has received little attention from the Brave team. This relates to the following issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/44014
To summarize, when you either leave a sync chain from your phone or delete one that your phone is connected to (at least for Android, I cannot confirm if this happens on iOS) and your mobile browser has tab groups on it, all of those tab groups are closed on your phone. This appears related to Chromium’s intended behavior of deleting tab groups across synced devices when they are closed on any of them, and Brave Sync was not configured to handle the data in light of this feature.
But that aside, I’m faced with a unique situation and wonder if anyone can help me. I’ve lost hundreds of tab groups because I deleted a sync chain and I’m looking to recover whatever I can. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a recent backup of my mobile browser, but I do have root access on my phone, so I am able to access /data and all of its subfolders. I made sure to back up Brave shortly after this happened, so I have some data from just after the tab groups were closed, and it’s safe for me to mess around with the files if needed.
Conveniently, I happen to have a backup of my “BraveSoftware” folder on desktop from just over a week ago, and the “Sync Data” folder is still present with information from my phone from around that time. I checked some of the files and I may be in luck, because they seem to contain Open Tabs data, but the files are not fully readable as they appear to be encrypted.
My question here is, is it possible for me to somehow recover the tabs using the synced data from this folder? I am not familiar enough with Brave’s file system to know where exactly to move or copy files to or what to tinker with. Could I potentially decrypt the .ldb file in Sync Data to retrieve whatever is in there in plain text? What’s the best approach for me here?
I appreciate anyone with the patience to read through this and any help that you can offer.