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Monday 20 May 2013

Opera Ugrades are losing settings





I have been an Opera user for several years. I like the layout of the browser as well as the various options that it gives you. Options such as remembering your user name and password to multiple domain login pages. Like recalling certain personal details for when you are filling in forms. But Opera, in the past, has had many drawbacks. One that I frequently come across is that certain webpages refuse to load fully – the browser will load a few elements and then freeze. That is all very well, but I need to refer to certain web pages frequently for my writing. On such occasions my only solution has been to load Firefox and, lo and behold, the webpage loads fully and immediately. Another drawback recently came to my notice, and it seems that I am not the only victim of this latest snag.

There have been numerous reports of Opera losing some of its settings during an upgrade. I first noticed this when I was logging into the back end of one of my websites last week. Usually pressing ‘Ctrl + Enter’ would bring up my user name and the password (in asterisks of course) and I would automatically be logged into the website. Not so! All I got were blank fields. That’s all very well, but I had about 150 of these login points saved by Opera. I searched for a solution through Google. I have yet to find a way to turn Opera back in time so as to place all of the data where it should be. But I did find a couple of programs that at least recover all of the data, which is stored encrypted in a file called wand.dat

The first one I found was Opera Password Recovery Master, which you can download here . With this program you get a display of the urls, user name and the first four digits of the passwords, and are told that to recover the whole passwords you need to pay for the full version of the program  for somewhere between $20 and $40, depending on the type of license. A little more googling led me to find Opera Password Decryptor, which you can download here . This program goes a little further than the previous one, giving you the full passwords and allowing you to export them all as either a text file or an html file - and it's free!

I don’t use Opera Mail, but apparently some users have lost all of their mail contacts, and some people even their bookmarks. To avoid this happening to you in the future, export your contacts and bookmarks before carrying out an upgrade, then you can always import them again if necessary. Maybe the Opera developers can look into this and incorporate into their next upgrade some appropriate code that takes care of this problem.