Manual one-way Sync as temporary measure

dhylton

Hi all, I'm a relatively long-time user with Vivaldi running across a couple of linux laptops and two Macs. Love it.

Day or two after the outage, without being aware of the outage, I performed a periodic wipe-and-redeploy of one of the laptops. No backup, because ... I had sync.

If I understand correctly, copying a profile from one machine to another is bad because it breaks ... sync? If correct, is that the only thing it breaks? Here is what I am thinking - tell me how/where I'm making a bad decision.

Dupe a good profile from one machine to the fresh laptop.
Start Vivaldi on the new machine using the duped profile.
Go to settings, disable sync.

If sync is the only problem:

This will at least get my new laptop/Vivaldi to the point of being usable.
Once sync is fixed, I can blow away the duped profile, login again and turn on sync to download the settings properly.

... or at least this is what I'm hoping. Thoughts? Warnings?

art4style

it's been month, clearly will be a thing also in January, they should offer local temp solution using our decryption key to decrypt it on new machine

Aaron

@dhylton
I copied the profile directory directly between the same version of Linux and Vivaldi, and so far, nothing has gone wrong.
In fact, I am running three similar versions of Vivaldi, namely the latest stable (), the latest snapshot (7.1.3554.3) and the latest sopranos (7.1.3553.1), and none of them have failed so far.I'm using the same profile.
To be on the safe side, you must back up the configuration file directory of the currently running Vivaldi instance.

I don't have a Mac computer so don't know what to expect.
Android phones currently have no solution at all. Unrooted Android phones cannot extract configuration files.

mib2berlin

@dhylton
Hi, copy profiles between systems are working as @Aaron mentioned but between different platforms does not.
Some files and folders are encrypted, passwords for example.
Iirc extension settings can make problems too.
Don`t copy a profile over an existing profile, move or rename the profile folder "Default" or create new profile and delete the content of "Profile 1" and copy the content over.

More details about backup and using profiles in an thread from @Zalex108:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/51704/guide-v-backup-extra-steps?page=1

dhylton

Knowing I'd run into problems, but knowing it's all just files and therefore easy enough to clean up ... I copied a working profile from my mac to my linux instance. I got the expected warning about saved passwords and such, but the only other issue I've seen so far is that (despite showing up and offering menus when clicked) the extensions didn't work. I removed and re-added the extensions and now they work. This made sense to me. And I'm off to the races on the new laptop now.

Expecting the same issue when copying from linux, I started looking into a way to extract the "Vivaldi secret key" from the various systems. I haven't dug too much yet, but did attempt on the mac and so far haven't been able to find it. I was only connected via ssh so could only use the "security" tool - I may have an easier time finding something via the graphical keychain utility when I get back to the office.

Meanwhile, if someone can point me in the right direction for locating instructions for this system-level extraction across the different platforms, I'd be grateful. I'm relatively sure it's possible, and therefore it should also be possible to write a script or helper (or just documentation) to assist copying a full profile without any loss. I'm not after a sync replacement, but it sure would be nice to have a fully functional workaround while sync is out to lunch.

Thanks for the responses!

dhylton

@mib2berlin That thread includes some really helpful information. Thanks!

mib2berlin

@dhylton
I just delete the file Login Data and then import the passwords from an exported .CVS file in the dialogue of:
chrome://password-manager/settings
You can do the same with a working Vivaldi sync system, delete the file and start sync.
You will get an exact copy of the other system with all settings, tabs, sessions.

DGarner

I believe I have a solution to the problem posed by @dhylton regarding extracting the secret keys, etc..

I have not tested to see if the keys were accurate, but all of the other decrypted information is, and I have not tested this on anything other than Windows, however this should be cross-platform. (Windows, Linux and Mac)

I won't have time to test this cross-platform until late tonight or tomorrow, but if anyone else wants to try, what I've done is ..

Wrote a script in Python that prompts you to select your browser, included are most of the popular Chromium based browsers, including Vivaldi, of course, Chrome, Brave, etc..

Once your browser is selected via prompt, the next prompt shows you your master secret key, decrypted, in base64, etc..

Then upon answer another prompt, "Do you want to extract passwords? (y/n)" if you select yes, will extract and decrypt all your browser-based saved passwords and display in console and pipes the output into a file in the base folder.

Give me just a few moments and I will upload this to Github and post a link.

Ayespy

@dhylton said in Manual one-way Sync as temporary measure:

If I understand correctly, copying a profile from one machine to another is bad because it breaks

Not between Windows and/or Linux. Not sure about Mac.

dhylton

@DGarner - I'm certainly interested. Thus far I've extracted secrets from a mac, but have had less luck on the linux side - possibly due to confusion between Vivaldi and Chrome ... this seems to work on the mac:

security find-generic-password -w -a Vivaldi

Ayespy

@art4style said in Manual one-way Sync as temporary measure:

clearly will be a thing also in January

Don't count on it.

DGarner

@dhylton
Feel free to provide feedback and/or let me know if this is helpful for your needs. I don't know why I spent so much time on this today, but I was bored at work in between the million fires that are burning us alive.

https://github.com/dgarner-cg/cx - for description in README

https://github.com/dgarner-cg/cx/blob/main/chromium-history_password_secrets_history-extractor.py - for script

I haven't written a requirements file yet and I'm getting a million calls, sorry for delay in getting this message out.. lol.

Requirements

Universal:
pip install pycryptodome
pip install matplotlib

Windows:
pip install pywin32

Linux:
pip install secretstorage

Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python3-dbus python3-secretstorage

Fedora:
sudo dnf install python3-dbus python3-secretstorage

If you want to extend the history analysis:
pip install pandas

DGarner

@dhylton
Any news? How'd it work?