Health Check deleted cookies without running!

[Thetbone]

I was trying to free up some disk space and decided to use health check. I got to the page where you can click each thing it's going to do and check or uncheck it. I decided to open up Chrome again to manually save some settings before continuing and to my surprise my cookies had ALREADY been deleted! I had not followed through with the Health Check yet! I had only analyzed and not actually cleaned! What is going on?? Where was the cookie file placed? How do I retrieve it? I had important data stored as a cookie on a website and now it's all gone.

[nukecad]

If you had only run the Health Check scan and hadn't clicked on 'Make it better' then it would not have removed anything.

Do you have Chrome itself set to clear your cookies on closing?
If you don't want Chrome to do that then check this and turn off 'Clear cookies and site data when you quit Chrome'.
https://www.groovypost.com/howto/automatically-delete-browsing-history-chrome/

Another possibility is that if you have CCleaner Pro and have Smart Cleaning's 'automatic browser cleaning' set to clean Chrome (without notification) when you close Chrome then it will do just that and clean Chrome whenever you close it using the Custom Clean rules that you have set for Chrome.
eg. Similar to this but set for Chrome (and not Firefox as shown in this example):

[Thetbone]

Thanks for your reply.

1. I did NOT hit "Make It Better". This is the point where I opened Chrome back up to try and save some settings and noticed it had already been removed. I then backed out of the Health Check and never hit "Make It Better".

2. I close out of Chrome daily and restart my computer ever so often with no issues of anything being cleared. This happened after CCleaner prompted to close Chrome in order to analyze.

3. I have the Free version - I do not have Pro. "Enable Smart Cleaning" is checked but "automatic browser cleaning" is locked behind pro.

Is this a bug? What is going on here? I'm now afraid to even open CCleaner as I'm not sure what prompted the clearing of my cookies when I never actually followed through with the clean-up.

[nukecad]

We can rule out Smart Cleaning then if you have the Free version.

I'm not sure just what happened, but CCleaner would not remove anything if you just analyzed and didn't then follow up with a clean.
(If it did that then we would see many more people shouting about it).
I often do an analyze on it's own (both with Health Check and Custom Clean) when checking things to answer questions here and it never removes anything if I don't follow up with a clean. (I've done it a couple of times on this thread to check/screenshot the messages).

The one thing from what you say is that you told Health Check to close Chrome after it prompted you.
To try and get more information did it just close it, or did it then say it was taking a long time closing and ask you to 'force' close it?

And when you say that you 'backed out' of Health Check how did you do that?

I'm just trying to find exactly what you steps you took to see if it can be reproduced.

If you could tell us what website it was, and maybe indicate without detais what type of data it was, that could also help.
(PS. User data is not usually stored in Cookies, so it may have been something other than a cookie such as a form or session info).

Have you checked that Chrome setting?
Browsers will sometimes change settings on their own without telling you.

 

[Thetbone]

It prompted it needed to close Chrome. I can't remember if I manually closed Chrome and then hit OK or just let it close it by hitting OK, but it did not have to do a force close. As I got to the final step where two steps were checked and two were locked behind the paywall, I realized I should backup the data on the site (here: https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/#/ ), so I re-opened Chrome which automatically restores all my tabs (I do this daily). When I navigated to this tab, however, my data was already missing/wiped. I refreshed a few times with no luck. I went back to CCleaner and clicked into the first tab and unchecked everything hoping that would "release" the file but no luck. Finally I backed out of Health Check using a back arrow I believe (I'm afraid to go through the steps again because I've spent a few hours re-building my data on that site and don't want to risk it again). I kept refreshing the page and closing and re-opening Chrome hoping it would restore. I completely exited out of CCleaner and still no luck. Then I updated to the most recent version when I restarted and still no luck. 

This site was working earlier in the day. The data was gone after CCleaner closed Chrome, as far as I can tell. Nothing else I did that day was different than any other day, so I can confidently rule out Chrome doing something weird or some other program or some weird update other than CCleaner.

[nukecad]

That sounds more like the data was lost because that particular tabs 'session' was closed rather than cookies being cleared.
(If you look at the Custom Clean options you'll see that 'session' and 'cookies' for a browser are different settings).

Things already entered onto a webpage will be saved in the session information, unless you specifically save it elsewhere in which case it will usually be saved as a 'form' which again is a different cleaning category for browser cleaning; or saved as a file on your computer or the websites server.
(Many multiple page forms for example have a 'save and continue later' button for doing just that).

Closing a session (usually by closing the tab) will lose the information entered in that session, it doesn't need to be wiped because it's temporary data so just closing the session/tab loses it unless it's been saved.

I see that it's a character attribute editor for a game, hopefully you had your character(s) attributes saved/backed up? At least to a certain point.

Why/how that session got closed and so the information in it lost I don't know.

Chrome can restore the previous session if you lose it for some reason, say because of a crash, but it you have opened/closed it multiple times since then that's not going to be an option for you.
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-restore-previous-session-chrome-firefox/

I've never know it to happen like you describe with just doing a CCleaner analyze and not a clean, and AFAIK Health Check doesn't close sessions or clear forms anyway, (but I think that sessions might get closed if you force close the browser during an analyze), which is why I was asking just what steps you took to see if it could be replicated.

I'll flag this up to the staff to see if they have any comments, but unfortunately I think that the information has been lost.

The only advice I can give is to make sure in future that you have your characters' attributes saved, because anything that closes the session will lose that information if you haven't saved it.

[Andavari]

I'd recommend finding where your Chrome profile is stored, and then make a ZIP backup copy of it, doing so backs up all of your configuration. You'd then only have to remember to keep that ZIP backup up-to-date when you've made significant enough changes.

[Thetbone]

The data for the game was still saved within the game. It just took a few hours to transfer that information back to the website again. The site also has a function to save the data as a json file, but I hadn't done a manual backup in a few months so my data had changed too much since my last save.

From the FAQ on their Discord:

 

Quote

Where is the data for the site stored? Will they disappear if I clear my browser? The data is stored in LocalStorage(think cookies, but won't expire). It will not be deleted if you delete your history or cookies. To backup your data, click on the gear icon at the top right of the website.

I guess I was wrong about it being stored in cookies. Sorry about that. My next question is what is localStorage and why does Health Check clear that when analyzing, which is what I assumed happened? Here's what I found about it if it helps.

Edited June 6, 2021 by Thetbone

[nukecad]

"Local Storage" simply means 'saved somewhere on your computers drive/a physically connected drive' - as opposed to being saved online on a server.

It doesn't actually specify any particular location where on the local storage, just that it's there somewhere.

You would have to ask the game developers, or maybe other players, just where the game/character data is stored 'locally'.

I'd take a guess that it will be somwhere in 'C:\Users\username\AppData\Local' or '...\AppData\Roaming' (or both), probably in a sub-directory with the name of the game?
Note that 'Appdata' is usually a hidden folder so you will need to set File Explorer to show hidden items (using an admin account) if you want to try and find it yourself.

Like many things computer though if you are not sure then don't mess with it or you could lose more than just some character attributes - those hidden folders are hidden from non-technical users for good reasons.

[Thetbone]

I asked. Here's where it is stored:

Google Chrome records Web storage data in a SQLite file in the user's profile. The subfolder containing this file is "\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Local Storage" on Windows

So how is CCleaner's analyze system or the Chrome shut down system pre-emptively clearing this user data? I was under the impression no files should be deleted before choosing for it to "make it better", but this is file data stored on my hard drive that for some reason is getting wiped before the clean. I've since rebuilt the data, so I'm not sure how much of this user data folder was wiped.

My initial guess was that CCleaner marked and locked the files it had scheduled to wipe. I then revisited the website before exiting the program, so it couldn't access the data and, thus, rewrote it? And then when I did exit out of CCleaner, the file was already there so...yeah, I'm not sure what would happen to the "locked" data at that point. This is just a guess - just trying to help narrow it down. I'm kinda paranoid to use CCleaner at this point considering it's ability to wipe data without me agreeing to it.