Re: [tlug] Chrome ate my profile

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2018-03-11 23:41 +0900 (Sun), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> It may all be out there in the cloud, but I don't recall that I set
> things up to backup to the cloud, so....

Various things are backed up to the cloud if you logged Chrome into a
Google account and and didn't explicitly turn off synchronization. The
very first section at the top of the [Settings](chrome://settings/)
page, labeled 'People', will give you the option to sign in or sign
out, depending on your current state.

If you're paranoid, or even if you're not, you should use a "sync
passphrase" for your data; this encrypts all the sync'd data locally
before uploading it to Google. Once you've set a sync passphrase any
unencrypted data will be replaced by the encrypted version and other
devices will not be able to sync until you enter the passphrase on
them, too. If you forget the passphrase you'll have to find a Chrome
instance that has a recent copy of your data and set a new one; if you
don't have that, your data are gone.

I'm not clear on the interaction of browser history with other things
such as Google Assistant, Now and Home, however; I think if you enable
certain kinds of tracking on that it may be sending at least some of
your browser history separately to other services so that Assistant et
al. can make use of it.

For Onetab you're kinda SOL unless you did an export; it stores data
only localy and has no synchronization that I'm aware of. 

If you're truly paranoid and don't trust Google's encryption of your
sync data, you can switch to Firefox and set up your own sync
server[1][2]. You're likely to take a big reliability hit there,
though, unless you really know what you're doing and are willing to
put in a non-trivial amount of work.

[1]: https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html
[2]: https://dev.jlelse.de/for-the-paranoids-install-your-own-firefox-sync-server/

cjs
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Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

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