Password managers like LastPass, Dashlane, Keepass, and 1Password (among others) are increasingly popular. Browsers, however, have been able to hold and store passwords for quite a long time.
Most of us use Firefox Sync or Chrome’s Google sign-in to keep things closer than a password manager is, with an eye towards simplicity rather than outright security. Sure, browsers have password requirements to use their vaults, but…
On a new PC, in Firefox, I’m struggling to get the browser to ask to save passwords. This is weird, as I’ve always seen the prompt when I enter a new password for a site, or update one. Not this time. In an effort to try again, perhaps thinking that a stored login was causing the issue, I clocked Remove All, and told Firefox to go ahead and remove all of the passwords.
Bear in mind that I’d put in text to filter this list down to two, a login item with and without “www” in the URL. So, it was showing a list of two items. Remove all would remove these two, right? Nope.
I got annoyed when Firefox stopped responding, and eventually got the message that a script was taking longer to run than expected, etc. I didn’t think more of this until I tried again to get Firefox to remember the site, and after it didn’t suggest saving the password, I checked the Saved Logins again only to find a completely empty list.
Oops. Breathe.
New PC is less than a month old. Old PC is right there. Sync loves to be tidy, so make sure it’s not connected to a network because, sure as anything, it’s going to remove them from that PC too if it can.
Open Firefox on the in-tact PC, enter “about:support” and look for the Profile Folder entry and click the Open Folder button. Search for “logins.json”, “key3.db” and “key4.db”.
I copied these to a USB stick, put that in the new PC, immediately put a backup elsewhere in the cloud, then closed Firefox on the new PC after opening that same profile folder on thew new PC. After copying all three files to the folder on the new PC, I held my breath, started Firefox, checked in Options for Saved Logins and saw a full list again.
Whew.
Now to get LastPass installed and export these to somewhere else more secure and cull the list of heavily-outdated passwords.
Oh, and yeah, figure out why Firefox isn’t asking to update or save new passwords…