I made a reset to my Mac and now Firefox doesn't recognise my email - all my important passwords and tabs are saved to my account. It is a different email (this one I only created to have access to support).
I made a reset to my Mac and installed every app/programme back from scratch. After installing Firefox I have been trying to sign in to my account and simply is not recognised. At no point I am allowed to introduce my password (even though I forgot it) but it also doesn't allow me to recover it. I have a recovery email associated and a recovery key. Firefox doesn't recognise my email - all my important passwords and tabs are saved to my account. It is a different email from this that I am using (I only created this account with the current email in order to have access to support). I appreciate some help! Thank you.
All Replies (3)
If you only did a Primary email and no secondary email in case of lost login there is not much that can be done here. As you can see in the screenshot it gives option for secondary email but if none was set or entered then further recovery is impossible to do there. Also reason why firefox doesn't recognize the email recovery -the most likely case that it's not the email associated in your "Profile" that is why it's not working. This is why, I tell users to create email address logins that isn't associated to just accounts.firefox.com should the account become lost. At this point no one can verify the user trying to get their account back is the same person.
If I'm understanding you correctly, did you completely wipe your Macbook & then reinstall everything fresh? That's a dangerous move if you didn't backup files you needed to a external drive first.
I'm not sure if all hope is lost here but keep trying the other emails you know you have. I once thought I was certain which email I was using for Firefox Accounts but I turned out to be wrong & discovered it was another one. Then I was finally able to login. I hope you can find it!
Future advice to live by: Never trust cloud backups as your only source of a data backup! Always backup to a physical external drive or USB stick first & then to a cloud backup. It all depends on how important the data is to you. This is a painful lesson a bunch of people have had to learn. Cloud backup is untrustworthy. And I been trying to get the word out about this for years, that Firefox Sync is not supposed to be used as a single source of Firefox data backup.
Please do the following for proper data backup & update your backups manually every few months so they are current: Backup Firefox's profile to your external drive/USB drive instead or to another cloud backup service like DropBox. Instructions to backup a Firefox profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
Firefox 79 [released July 2020] finally added a Export Passwords feature. You can use that to create a .CSV file that has all your usernames & passwords in plain text. But this is also a dangerous file to keep lying around. You should re-import the password csv file into another browser or password manager & hide the backup .csv file in your external drive or a usb stick & put it in a location only you have access to.
If you want to be extra secure, you could also place the password csv file inside an encrypted ZIP file that requires a password. But I would be extra careful about doing that. Especially if you are known to forget passwords easily. Keep it as simple as possible. The best practice for hiding important passwords are in offline locations. Not cloud backup sites or webemail accounts. They can be hacked. It just depends on how paranoid you are & what your passwords lead to. For example, don't trust your bank passwords or email passwords to be stored in ANY file. You must commit those to memory or reset them every few months to protect yourself.
Okulungisiwe ngu NoahSUMO
You also do not have a Time Machine backup that you can use to restore file(s)?.