Restarted computer and Brave started over with none of my bookmarks or history or anything. how can I get my stuff back?

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@1Kevin,
Thanks for reaching out.
Sorry for the inconvenience, I know things like this can be frustrating. Luckily, things like this rarely happen without cause. If all you did was restart your PC, then there’s a high likelihood that your data is still there on your machine. So lets try to find it!

Wrong profile?
Starting with the easiest potential solution – can you confirm that you’re using the same browsing profile you always have?

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I ask because when you create a new profile, it’s created fresh/from scratch – which would make it appear as though all your data is missing. However, if this is the case, you simply need to change profiles back to the one you regularly use. You can do this in the menu in the screenshot above.

Is the data there?
If the above doesn’t prove to be the case, lets check manually to see if your data is still present. To do this:

  1. In Windows, find where Brave stores data by going to C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default
  • Note: If you do have more than one profile, replace the Default in the last part of the address with the profile folder you use normally (ie Profile 1, Profile 2, etc).
  1. You should see a whole bunch of stuff here, but we’re just looking for the files that hold some identifying data so that you can confirm that it is, indeed, the very same profile data you’re looking for. Scroll down until you see a Bookmarks file, right-click on the file, then Open with --> Notepad. :
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  2. Notepad should launch with some code in it that looks something like this:
{
   "checksum": "854d136e73b36b3e994587498f1e9d12",
   "roots": {
      "bookmark_bar": {
         "children": [ {
            "date_added": "13235765365138038",
            "guid": "9042fc64-ee18-45d7-822c-0356159a98b3",
            "id": "5",
            "name": "Games - Lumosity",
            "type": "url",
            "url": "https://www.lumosity.com/app/v4/games"
         } ],
         "date_added": "13224657173689755",
         "date_modified": "13235765365138038",
         "guid": "00000000-0000-4000-a000-000000000002",
         "id": "1",
         "meta_info": {
            "order": "1.0.1"
         },
         "name": "Bookmarks",
         "type": "folder"
...
}

In my example above, amongst all the code you can see https://www.lumosity.com/app/v4/games" next to the "url" label. This, as you may have guessed, is a bookmark! So on your end, when you open this bookmarks file you should (hopefully) see something similar, but with your personal bookmarks denoted. Scroll through the list and confirm that these are in fact your bookmarks.

Let me know what you find out from trying the above tests and that will help us narrow down what our next step is. If you need additional assistance locating these directories or any of the above steps let me know and I’d be happy to help.

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