Saml Posted September 12, 2013 Share Posted September 12, 2013 i have just run ccleaner on my win 7 , and have lost all my firefox bookmarks, thunderbird emails, all stored passwords. Help required urgently. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan_B Posted September 12, 2013 Share Posted September 12, 2013 Versions of Firefox and Thunderbird might be useful to those who can help you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted September 12, 2013 Moderators Share Posted September 12, 2013 Was anything else ran, some other sort of clean up software? I'm not aware of CC being physically capable of deleting emails, stored passwords; yes as that's part of cookie cleaning. The common factor with Firefox & Thunderbird is Mozilla, and CC can 'cleanse' some of its databases but to my knowledge, not bookmarks. Sounds like your Mozilla profile has been corrupted. Did CC finish normally? Any PC errors or unexplained reboots? But more importantly - any backups ??? Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Saml Posted September 12, 2013 Author Share Posted September 12, 2013 Firefox 23.01 Thunderbird 17.08 Everything seemed to work fine. The profile files in both seem to have been deleted and new profiles created without, bookmarks, emails, email addresses. Thunderbird still has all the email account settings but has lost the passwords it uses to download mail. Firefox password loss is a nuiscance but not fatal. I cant find any backups - the backupfiles in the profiles have not much in them. External backup is a few months old. Any Idea how to recover the mail? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted September 12, 2013 Moderators Share Posted September 12, 2013 Long shot - anything in the Recycle Bin that may help you? I think the backup folder under the Profiles folder just has bookmarks. Your external backup will only help if you included the Profiles folder location (not something most people think to do). Do you do a hard drive image or clone at all? Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Saml Posted September 12, 2013 Author Share Posted September 12, 2013 Very odd. I found a new folder on my desktop called Old Firefox data and in it found the json files to restore my bookmarks. What created this folder I don't know, but the date and time are about the same as running CC. Can't find anything similar for Thunderbird. Nothing in trash. don't know what I have in my external backup yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators DennisD Posted September 12, 2013 Moderators Share Posted September 12, 2013 I'm still on Firefox 20 so can't check, but this isn't some automatic update by Firefox is it? Browser devs sometimes have the habit of changing things in a drastic way, and if so the update would have left your important stuff in a created folder. Might be worth checking to see if FF is set to update automatically, although this might not actually be the cause of your issue. http://www.technipag...in-firefox.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Saml Posted September 12, 2013 Author Share Posted September 12, 2013 It remains a mystery, but the new file contained all info to restore everything. For Thunderbird I went to the profile file and did a "restore previous version" which brought everything back apart from a few email from today. So No more CCleaner can't be sure what was to blame but won't be taking the risk again. Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted September 13, 2013 Moderators Share Posted September 13, 2013 of course it can't be ruled out completely, but it would be highly improbably to be CC. i would use this scare to get your backups in order, once that's secured away, you can run CC again (with confidence) that if things do go pear-shaped, that your backups will save your bacon. (are you running any add-ons in FF?) Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
systemtest Posted September 13, 2013 Share Posted September 13, 2013 Regardless of how "safe" ccleaner is purported to be, it's best to have some kind of fallback position when running it for the first time. Happy to see you got out of the mess unscathed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan_B Posted September 13, 2013 Share Posted September 13, 2013 So No more CCleaner can't be sure what was to blame but won't be taking the risk again. In my view it is foolish to think that CCleaner would deliberately waste time and effort to RELOCATE your Mozilla Firefox profiles to a different location on the system drive. CCleaner is intended to remove junk and increase available free space, not to shift junk around and to cause the creation of a new profile and a consequent reduction of free space. In my view it was probably a Mozilla action to move your old profile to a safe place in case it held anything you might value, and to then give you a new clean empty profile. In the distant past when people volunteered for a Beta release of Firefox the result was a new profile with a new random character sequence as part of the path, then you could fall back to the standard version if the latest gave a problem. Mozilla has become worse and made changes against the wishes of many, so I jumped out of the Firefox chaos into the sanity of Palemoon, which gives me a STABLE browser that still runs the same Addons and bookmarks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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