How To : Opera Password Recovery

Opera has a handy password manager feature – the “Wand”. The only problem with Opera Wand is that it doesn’t have any way to view or export the saved passwords. Luckily there are some tricks and third-party tools that can do it for you. Since I recently spent several hours researching various solutions I figured I’d compile a short list of my discoveries here for the benefit of other Opera users who may encounter a similar problem. Enjoy 🙂

UnWand

UnWand is a very simple and free command-line utility that extracts passwords from a Opera Wand datafile. To find the wand.dat file enter opera:about in the address bar and locate the line “Opera directory” in the “Paths” section. wand.dat will be in that folder. Copy that file to the same directory as unwand.exe and run retrieve.bat.

This may not work for everyone. In my case the program only displayed a handful of cached passwords (out of hundreds actually stored), so it might not be fully compatible with Opera 9.51. The source code is available but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptography to attempt to debug it. Also, if you have set a master password, unwand.exe won’t be able to decode it.

JavaScript/HTML hacks

There are various tricks that can recover the login data from the password entry form, not Wand itself. There’s a Opera “Power Button” that can retrieve Wand passwords using a bit of JS. I also found another related password recovery technique which involves editing the HTML source of the password form in question.

These two methods will only work if you can still access the original login page. They will also be useless if the site in question has been completely redesigned (as Opera probably won’t be able to recognize the new login form) or if it uses HTTP authentication.

Shareware Tools

Since neither of the aforementioned free methods were 100% effective for me I finally turned to commercial software for help. There are two applications that can recover Wand passwords :

  • Opera Password Recovery threw a few error messages but managed to read and display all of my Wand passwords correctly. The demo version only shows the first 3 characters from the passwords, but I’m sure you can find a solution for that. And by that I mean “buy it for $27”, naturally.
  • The second candidate, Opera Password Recovery Master, crashed on the first run. When I tried it again it started up fine but failed to recover any passwords. Too bad.
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10 Responses to “How To : Opera Password Recovery”

  1. Ari Þórálfur says:

    Why would I at all use Opera and pay 27,-$, when I get Password Exporter for nothing when I use Mozilla Firefox?

  2. White Shadow says:

    So use Firefox. One might ask why are you even reading this post if you don’t use Opera?

  3. Kanishk says:

    Thanks dude!
    Unwand helps…… 🙂
    Was in gr8 trouble….
    Thanks again

  4. Jame Brian says:

    I found this shareware works well on my computer – http://www.top-password.com/opera-password-recovery.html, it’s worth a try!

  5. Darker says:

    I’m a registered owner of Passcape Opera Password Recovery and as far as I know, this program is the only tool that can handle all Opera password correctly, including ones that were encrypted with Master Password, etc. While other similar tools – cannot. Even though it is my humble opinion, the tool is worth to pay for.

  6. Ade says:

    Thank You for the Help With recovering my password it works

  7. […] If you would like to recover all your passwords, the following article discusses several possibilities, both free and shareware : “How To : Opera Password Recovery”. […]

  8. […] If you would like to recover all your passwords, the following article discusses several possibilities, both free and shareware : “How To : Opera Password Recovery”. […]

  9. Jerzi says:

    This freeware will do the trick:

    http://www.sterjosoft.com/opera-passwords.html

  10. Peallyss says:

    This page has 3 methods to recover opera password, easy and free.

    https://www.iseepassword.com/recover-opera-password.html

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