All saved logins gone! Corrupted logins.json

[earlpiggot]

I was surprised yesterday to be asked for a username and a password that I definitely remembered they were in the saved ones. Today, the same with another login. I went to check in options, security, saved logins, only to find out that I had three entries, those that I manually put yesterday or so!

I sync bookmarks, history and passwords across 3 more devices. Bookmarks and history look fine.

Checking my profile folder, I find key3.db with a size of 40960 bytes, and logins.json with just 1.583 bytes! But I there it is: a file logins.json.corrupt with a size of 788599 bytes and a datestamp of October 6. It's all zero bytes inside!

I had a couple of unexpected Nightly crashes lately, I never imagined the damage they would cause. The only version I find through Windows 7 restore is after the damage, a 555 bytes version.
I am devastated.

Any chance for recovery? through Firefox Sync probably? does it keep older versions?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 ID:20161008030200 CSet: a835589ae0c63a2d91be150d80b5fc600e44b447

[earlpiggot]

I went to my laptop. I last used Firefox there in August -luckily without needing it to sync past Oct 6. I copied key3.db and logins.json from there, to my desktop pc. Well, apart from any new entries in between August and October, I managed to get my logins back.

If there any other workaround, to get an even newer version, it would be much helpful to more people. The way I think about it, shouldn't these files be automatically backed up, every time Firefox starts, so that after a crash the backup copy is used, if the original is found corrupted?

[DanRaisch]

There's always https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/febe/

[WaltS48]

Well, I just used Nightly and successfully logged onto several forums until I got to this one. Seems Nightly forgot my new username and password. I know it was there because I've been using it.

EDIT: Windows Nightly was okay.

[earlpiggot]

There's always https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/febe/

Yes, I've been using it for years and years. But unless you save multiple backups, you may end up with the one that contains the corrupted json file

[DanRaisch]

But unless you save multiple backups, you may end up with the one that contains the corrupted json file

That's true for any backup. You could copy a backup to another location and save that as a "backup backup."