March 05, 2006

Firefox Essentials: Get To Know Your Profile

Back It Up

By Matt McKenzie

Courtesy of InternetWeek

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Back It Up
It may seem risky to keep all of your eggs, as it were, in one basket. Firefox was designed to be user-friendly and easy to customize, however, and the data in your profile folder serves both purposes extremely well. Yet it's also true that when things go wrong (and they WILL go wrong), it's far too easy to lose your entire online identity in a puff of virtual smoke. For some people, losing their profile data and starting over from scratch is no big deal; for others, it's an absolute disaster.

Fortunately, it's a completely preventable disaster: A backed-up copy of your profile provides a quick and easy insurance policy in case your profile data is damaged or deleted.

This happens more often than you might expect, and it's not always a bad thing: I learned quite a bit about Firefox by playing with, tweaking -- and more than once, mangling beyond repair -- the various text-based configuration files located in the profile folder. Also, if you get into the habit of installing multiple Firefox extensions, you'll learn that it's often easier to yank a misbehaving profile than it is to track down the source of the problem, provided you have a backup ready and waiting.

Simply put, if you've got a backup for your profile tucked away somewhere safe, you can do almost anything to Firefox and still walk away without a scratch at the end of the day. What a deal.

Before you back up your profile folder, however, be sure to take care of two other tasks:

1. Clear your cache. Go to Tools > Options in the main Firefox menu, select the Privacy icon, and click the Clear Cache Now button in the Cache tab (a move that could cut the total size of your profile folder in half or more).

Clear your cache files before you back up your profile folder. They have a short shelf-life, and they're worse than useless when saved with a backup. Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery.

2. Shut down Firefox completely. This means opening the Windows Task Manager -- or its equivalent in OS X or Linux -- and ending any rogue firefox.exe processes that you find. To open the Task Manager in Windows XP, press the Ctrl+ Alt + Delete keys and click the Task List button, or right-click an empty space on the Taskbar and select Task Manager.

Next, click the top of the Image Name column to list the running processes in alphabetical order, and if you see firefox.exe in the list, select it and click the End Process button. In this case, ignore the dire-sounding confirmation warning, and click Yes to finish the job.

If you see a running firefox.exe process in Task Manager, kill it. Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery.

You know the drill from here: Copy your entire Profiles folder to another folder on your hard drive, a different hard drive, a CD, or wherever you care to stash it for safekeeping:

1. Select your Profiles folder and choose Edit > Copy To Folder from the Windows Explorer menu.

2. In the Copy Items window that pops up, navigate to your backup location and click the Copy button.

Backing up your Firefox profile is as easy as selecting the Profiles folder and copying it to a safe location where you can access it if necessary. Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery.

Page 4: Keep Backing It Up -- And Restore It

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