ChrisAbalos said:
they're gone from the preferences and they dont come up. i cant imagine that they got erased from the harddrive though... does anyone have any idea how i might be able to recover them?
It's tricky if they've been erased since if you're been using your Mac since they may already have been overwritten.
Are they gone from the Keychain Access application too? Go to Passwords, Internet and you can view them.
If you have a recent backup, you could import your internet passwords back into Keychain Access and they should reappear in Safari too.