New Install of Windows - Wanted to link sync account to new Firefox installation - Old one was over-written instead.Anyway to bring sync to previous date?
Straight and to the point - New installation of Windows. Old Firefox installation is gone - reformatted hard drive. Wanted to Sync a New Firefox installation and get all my bookmarks and passwords copied over. Listened to steps found in the "Add another computer" section of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-a-device-to-firefox-sync Asked something about re-making a recovery key which I did. Then it skipped off to "Syncing for the first time" etc. All my old Sync data was effectively over-written. I need the old data back - can anyone do that? Do the servers have a backlog on this data (They should, I believe) and can anyone reset it to what it was 2 days ago or so?
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Once you generate a new Sync key then all your data previously stored on the server is removed and gone and can't be recovered even if you would know the old Sync key. So I'm afraid that you are out of luck and have lost your personal data if you do not have another (local) backup. The current implementation of Sync isn't meant to be used for backup and best is to do this yourself.
Also, the Recovery Key (aka Sync Key) is the encryption algorithm for your data. So there's no point in having the Sync servers save the old copy of data because that data couldn't be decrypted via a new Sync Key.
The new version of Sync which is in the alpha version of Firefox 29 does away with that Sync Key and relies upon the account name and password to create the encryption algorithm which isn't user facing.
Well, here goes to guessing what my passwords are for a few select sites! O well, i can start anew. Firefox should use Sync as a backup though, as Chrome, it's main competition, does it.
Firefox Sync started out as the Weave add-on back in Dec 2007, long before there were browser data cloud services. Just about all that existed before Weave came about was Foxmarks (now known as Xmarks) for synchronizing bookmarks. Mozilla decided to add an element of security that Foxmarks didn't have via the Sync Key, and encrypt the user's data while it is off the user's devices. The downside to doing it that way was the user can't access their bookmarks from the web.
That is why Sync is being changed, to meet the expectations of its' users and do things in a manner more like the competitors who have sprung up in the last 6 years - (since Dec 2007).