March 05, 2006

Firefox Essentials: Get To Know Your Profile

Keep Backing It Up -- And Restore It

By Matt McKenzie

Courtesy of InternetWeek

Page 4 of 5

Keep Backing It Up
Next, you'll need to decide how often to create a fresh backup of your profile. Every day? Every time you install a new extension? Every full moon? Ultimately, that depends on what you're doing -- or, more to the point, what you're planning to do next. If you haven't used Firefox in two weeks, and you just logged on to check your e-mail for five minutes, then making another backup is about as useful as watching paint dry.

On the other hand, if you just saved dozens of bookmarks for obscure, one-of-a-kind Web sites as part of a marathon online research session, and the next item on your to-do list says "install a few dozen brand-new extensions," Murphy's Law is sure to make you pay dearly if you blow off your backup.

There's a lot of ground to cover between those two extremes, of course, but a little common sense will take you a long way.

Fixing The 'Fox: Restoring Your Backup Profile
So, you've got a problem: Firefox isn't working right, or maybe it's not working at all. Is it time to blow away your current profile and reach for your backup?

The truth is, you can often solve Firefox problems by replacing a single corrupt configuration file or disabling a single extension. This is a good thing: Every time you avoid a full-scale restore operation, you avoid the risk of losing data to an old or damaged backup. (I'll talk more about troubleshooting Firefox in the next instalment of our "Firefox Essentials" series.)

If you're sure it's time to start over, however, here's what you'll need to do:

1. Shut down Firefox if it's still running. Even if you don't see a browser window open, double-check your system's list of running processes, as outlined on the previous page. If you catch firefox.exe still running, make sure you shut it down before proceeding.

To overwrite a profile, copy your backup to the correct location. Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery.

2. Find your current Profiles folder (see the previous page for a list of locations for each operating system, and what to do if your Windows system files are hidden).

3. Open another window showing your backed-up Profiles folder and choose Edit > Copy To Folder from the Windows Explorer menu. In the Copy Items window that pops up, navigate to your current Profiles folder location and click the Copy button to replace your current profile with the backup.

4. Marvel at just how easy that was.


Backup And Restoration Made Easier?
Wouldn't it be nice to forget all this stuff, and just rely on some clever developer to write a Firefox extension to take care of it? Thanks to a utility called MozBackup (which only works on Windows), you can indeed back up and restore your profile data -- including bookmarks, e-mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache data, personal data, and configuration settings -- with a few mouse-clicks.

At least, I think you can -- I haven't actually tried MozBackup, and I can't vouch that it works as advertised. The question is: Should you rely on a third-party app to take care of your profile housekeeping? Honestly, I can't recommend it. If you know even the basics of fie management on a PC, backing up your Firefox profile is about as hard as tying your shoes. (An extension that performs automated backups at scheduled intervals -- now that would be handy. But to the best of my knowledge, no such extension exists.)

There is, however, a related Firefox extension that I do recommend: MR Tech Local Install. Among many other helpful features, it saves an archived copy of each extension XPI file on your PC, so that if you have to nuke your profile folder, you can reinstall your extensions from local copies -- a huge timesaver if you use more than a few at a time.

Page 5: One File At A Time: The Piecemeal Approach

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