I’ve been using Postman for a long time and have accrued a large number of Environment Variable Sets. I recently changed my email address, so I changed it in Postman. After confirming everything and logging back in, just about all of my environment variable values are gone! I’ve recognized that it’s the ones that contained only a “Current value” and not also an “Initial value” in the Environment Variable Set.
Is there any hope of getting these back! This is catastrophic!
Potentially, may be a bit “hacky” but a possibility based on what is available under the Postman cached files for your accounts.
While looking into your scenario I logged in with an account I didn’t have on my computer. While trailing through in the local cache (I use linux so it was under ~/.config/Postman) and found that there is a LevelDB under the Partitions (~/.config/Postman/Partitions/<partitionID>/IndexDB/https_desktop.com_0.indexeddb.leveldb/).
There are log files that track your environment variables and can easily be looked at (I used cat <filename>.log) and found that the newest variable that I created had a record where “sessionValue” is the value I have in the “Current Value” section.
I am suspecting that when you changed your email, it could have created a NEW partition which would have downloaded all the content from the Postman account wiping out the Current Value in the environment variable. So, if you can find the oldest Partition logs, you might be able to get the values out using some fun find/replace.
(This is all a hunch based on files/cache items found and how the user accounts leverages Partitions for storing data).
Wouldn’t changing the email address log you out of Postman to force you to login with your new email address which would automatically clear down any initial values.
You can log into Postman with many accounts/emails. I believe OP was changing their email address in their account so their account ID would be the same. Postman doesn’t use your email as the account ID in the system (from what I can tell) as there is a numerical account ID in the logs/settings/etc.
If they only changed the email on the profile (not a new account) then the initial values may be available in the logs as I mentioned because it seems to track quite a bit of information in them (some crude testing says that it should be plausible to get the initial values with some extracting work). The log files are worth a shot, but it may be a lost cause
Seeing hex values in log make me suspect that the log file was a bad write or its lost data since 0x00 is a null value.
I will take a look on my Mac tomorrow and see if there is anything else that may be of use. Mac could store it in a different way/format, I was using Linux when I posted the comment.
I knew it was a long shot but I have been in your shoes and any attempt was worth it as it could have saved you a lot of time/pain.
Going forward, I would suggest storing your secrets in Postman Vault and keeping either environments up to date with the latest sync of the values that are not sensitive.
I’ll have to look into the Postman Vault. I know that for any Environment Variables I had that contained an “Initial value”, those values persisted. I don’t really understand the logic behind the “Initial value” versus “Current value” field, to be honest, but that’s the behavior I observed.
