chette.com

Managing your Firefox profiles for easy backup – bookmarks, passwords, and settings

—

by

chette
in

In Mozilla Firefox, your bookmarks, passwords, and settings are saved in something called a profile. This is stored in your hard drive.

Your profile is typically located at C:Documents and Settings[User Name]Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfilesxxxxxxxx.default

Whenever you need to reinstall Windows, this might create problems, as most of us don’t usually back up our Application Data folder. You probably would want to save your profile instead in your data directory (or folder that you back up frequently)

To move your profile:

  1. Exit Firefox.
  2. Move your profile folder to your desired directory. For example, at E:SettingsFirefox
  3. Locate profiles.ini. This is typically located at C:Documents and Settings[User Name]Application DataMozillaFirefox
  4. Open profiles.ini in your favorite text editor. You should see the following:


    [General]
    StartWithLastProfile=1
    [Profile0]
    Name=default
    IsRelative=1
    Path=Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default
    Default=1

    Note: xxxxxxxx is an eight-character random value that is automatically assigned by Firefox upon installation.

  5. Change this to:


    [General]
    StartWithLastProfile=1

    [Profile0]
    Name=default
    IsRelative=0
    Path=E:SettingsFirefoxxxxxxxxx.default
    Default=1

    IsRelative is changed from 1 to 0 because absolute paths (not relative) are used.

    The Path value is changed to reflect the new path of the profile. Simply replace this with your new path, then replace xxxxxxxx.default with the name of your profile directory.

  6. Save profiles.ini
  7. Restart Firefox.

Comments

9 responses to “Managing your Firefox profiles for easy backup – bookmarks, passwords, and settings”

  1. jed99 Avatar
    jed99

    tnx chet. needed this.

    Reply
  2. chip Avatar
    chip

    This also makes it easy for me to move my Firefox profiles to multiple computers.

    Reply
  3. abswift Avatar
    abswift

    I\’ve always wanted to know how to do that. THanks chette

    Reply
  4. blaine r Avatar
    blaine r

    I noticed you changed the title of the post. This is much better. I was wondering about the \”Backing Up\” part!

    Reply
  5. chette Avatar
    chette

    Yes to blaine r 😉 You caught me there! My original article was supposed to be on \”backing up your profiles\” … & then I found this nifty trick on how to manage it instead. Much better, huh? Easier to just include it in automated backups.

    Needless to say, I forgot to change the title of article, hehe.

    Reply
  6. timrules Avatar
    timrules

    Hello.how do I have different profiles in firefox? We use only 1 computer at home. But we have different bookmarks etc

    Reply
  7. ron Avatar
    ron

    Funny.. I just needed to move my passwords from one laptop to another. With MozBackup and these nifty instructions, I now have things under control. Thanks!!!

    Reply
  8. Star Cow Avatar
    Star Cow

    thanks again i like firefox tips

    Reply
  9. garryiet Avatar
    garryiet

    I still think PHP has a major role to play in the future, with PHP5 object oriented and great features like SimpleXML – [url]http://file.sh/XML+torrent.html[/url]. IMHO I see PHP scripts for frontend apps and RoR apps for all the backend stuff, and that’s what I’am actually trying to do at work.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *