A small number of users have recently experienced the loss of their profiles after upgrading the browser to the latest version of Opera. The mistake particularly often impacted people who manually downloaded the upgrade from opera.com. We are very sorry to hear about such issues and have worked hard to resolve them as fast as possible. To that end, we would like to provide you with some further insights into what happened, and relate how those of you who ran into these issues can resolve them and bring back your profiles.

What happened?

Opera is based on Chromium, which means we frequently update our browser to the newest version of the engine. The issues that resulted in some users losing their profile data happened after we upgraded to version 102.0.4880.16 of Opera. 

With this particular upgrade, we introduced changes to better align with how profile management is handled in Chromium. This is a normal procedure for us, as Chromium keeps changing and we want to incorporate those changes that increase convenience and security of our browser.

Unfortunately the changeover caused issues for some users, who got a new profile as a result of the upgrade while their old profile remained intact in a previous location.

There are several possible reasons for the profile migration failing, including running out of drive space or experiencing an anti-virus software interaction or accompanying crash. In other cases, the migration process running in the background was unintentionally interrupted before it was finished.

The good news is that your profile was not deleted – it just remained in a previous location while your browser was looking for it elsewhere.

How can I get my profile data back?

If you haven’t lost your profile after the update to Opera v102 or haven’t yet upgraded from the version 101, you can just keep browsing and let the browser update itself as usual.

If you lost your profile after the update to Opera v102 (which means you are on version 102.0.4880.16), you can restore it by updating to the newer version and taking the following additional steps:

• In the browser, go to the About Opera page (Windows: “Menu” > About Opera, on Mac: Opera menu > About Opera or type opera://about in the address bar) and update the browser to a newer version than 102.0.4880.16
• After the update (which will restart the browser), go to About Opera once more, and scroll to the section “Paths”
  • For Windows users
    • Copy profile folder without trailing \Default, the profile folder might look like this example (don’t copy this example): C:\Users\user-name\AppData\Roaming\OperaSoftware\Opera Stable
    • Open Explorer (Windows+E)
    • Paste the copied path and press enter to go to the profile folder
    • Find folder named Default and remove it
  • For Mac users
    • Copy profile folder without trailing /Default, the profile folder might look like this example (don’t copy this example): /Users/user-name/Library/Application Support/com.operasoftware.Opera
    • Open Finder and press CMD+SHIFT+G (to go to Go to Folder)
    • Paste the copied path and press enter to go to the profile folder
    • Find folder named Default and remove it

• Before deleting folder “Default” – which will revert your old profile from before the update – be aware that you will lose all your browsing data since the initial version 102.0.4880.16 update.
• Note for the users who downgraded from 102.0.4880.16 to 101.0.4843.58 – Please also follow the steps described above.

If you have an Opera account and want to only retrieve your bookmarks, history, settings, open tabs, Pinboards, and passwords, you can simply log in and you should be able to get them back.

Once again, we apologize for this migration failure. We hope we were able to shed some light onto what happened, and that this information helped you restore your profile. We always strive to provide the optimal user experience and we do our utmost to ensure such incidents are avoided in the future.

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