Blaise Alleyne

Blaise Alleyne at

WAHOO! Okay, I was pretty reckless and I'm not sure exactly what did it and these instructions come with no warranty express or implied, but...

  • I copied the weave folder from inside my Firefox profile (not sure if that mattered), plus all of the lines in prefs.js to do with "services.sync.*"
  • I tried manually editing the preferences (resetting timestamps to zero, etc.), but what ended up happening is that when I opened IceWeasel with those lines just copy-pasted in from my Firefox profile in my old Ubuntu install that I'm no longer using, it gave me the "Pair a new Device" option the first time I accessed Sync settings!!
  • It disappeared if I cancelled pairing, but I just tried again, and successfully paired IceWeasel 30!!
  • I could see "tabs from my other computers" now, but my bookmarks clearly weren't there, so I shut IceWeasel down, and changed the value of all the services.sync.*.lastSync and services.sync.*.lastSyncLocal and a couple other similar timestamps, setting them to 0 from their prior values. Then, re-opened IceWeasel, ran the sync manually, and my bookmarks started appearing! I can now see my bookmarks and passwords, I'm pretty sure it's all come through! :)

So, it's still totally possible to pair a new device... just... not entirely through the GUI. And I'm sure there's a more efficient way than my hit/miss random edits to prefs.js, but I've at least narrowed it down to (a) something in the services.sync settings that will bring up the "Pair a new device" screen, at least once; (b) something to do with the services.sync.*.lastSync* settings that will trigger the browser to download everything again anew.

Thanks for the tip!

I'll worry about migrating from Mozilla's deprecated sync service to ownCloud another day... though, this method should probably work the same way if you already were using ownCloud, because I think that's just specified in the services.sync.clusterURL setting in prefs.js.

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