Password Recovery Method
Mozilla's Password Manager is a great tool for logging into dozens of websites without drowning in Post-It Notes, or using one password everywhere. Sometimes, however, you have a lot of passwords in there, and for one reason or another, you need to create a new profile, and wish to take your passwords with you. What do you do? Here's a simple way to recover them.
- Locate your profile directory. For the 3 major OSes, they're located in the following locations:
- Linux: ~/.mozilla/[Mozilla Profile Name]/[random string].slt/
- Mac OS X ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/[Profile Name]/[random string].slt/
- Windows 2000, XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[Windows Login Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\[Mozilla Profile Name]\[random string].slt\
- Windows 95, 98, ME*: C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\[Profile Name]\[random string].slt\
*This may vary slightly, Win95 may not have an "Application Data" folder, Win95 and 98 may or may not use the "Profiles" folder.
- In your profile directory, there will be a file with a string of numbers for the name, with a .s extension, such as 91453348.s. This is the file containing your login information. Open it in a text editor. There will be a block of text like so:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org
Bugzilla_login
~ZW1haWxhZHJlc3NAZG9tYWluLmNvbQ==
*Bugzilla_password
~UGFzc3dvcmQ=
.The top line is the URL where the information that follows belongs. The second line is the name of the username field. The third line is the username information, encoded in Base64. The fourth line is the name of the password field. The fifth line is the password data, also encoded in Base64. The final line is a period, which tells Mozilla that it has reached the end of stored information for that website, it is just a separator.
- In this example, the third and fifth lines are what we want. Copy them, and remove the ~ at the beginning of each. Then you can copy them into the form below to decode them. This will give you the username and password stored in your password file.
