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Want to know how to back up and restore your Mozilla Firefox profile? Well this video tutorial will show you how!

You will also learn how to return your backed up profile to your existing Mozilla Firefox installation or fresh install of Mozilla Firefox.

INSTRUCTIONS

Backing Up Mozilla Firefox Profile:

  1. Open your Mozilla Firefox.
  2. To prep your Firefox for backing it up, we will clear the private data which contains temporary internet files, cookies, and more. By pressing CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE simultaneously.
  3. Now we will close Mozilla Firefox by clicking File>Exit.
  4. We will now find our Mozilla Firefox profile folder. For me it is in C:\Documents
    and Settings\HP_Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles    ; For windows users, to find yours, find the drive you have windows installed then do a search in Windows Explorer for “Profiles” no quotes. For Mac users, do a search for “Profiles” as well, and when you see it located in a Firefox folder, that’s what you will then open.
  5. Now we copy our profile, and can back it up to another folder where we can burn it to a CD or DVD.

Restoring Backed Up Mozilla Firefox Profile:

  1. Have a fresh install or Mozilla Firefox installed.
  2. Lets take for example we have taken our backed up Firefox profile from a CD or DVD and copied it to our desktop, for this example lets name it ff-backup.
  3. We now want to be able to run this Mozilla Firefox profile, so we will have to open up the Mozilla Firefox profile manager to familiarize our self with it.
  4. To load the Mozilla Firefox profile manager we go to: start menu> run> then type in:firefox.exe -ProfileManager; now we press OK. Now we know how to get to the Mozilla Firefox profile manager so now we can exit it.
  5. We will now need to go to where we have Firefox installed, we will manually edit the file that deals with the Mozilla Firefox profile manager to show us what profiles we can run.
  6. For me it is in C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Application
    Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ ; use the method to find your profiles to find this folder as well from the Backing Up Firefox step 4.
  7. Locate the profiles.ini file, and open it with a text editor like notepad.
  8. We are now going to add our backed up Mozilla Firefox profile called ff-backup to our Mozilla Firefox profile manager inside the profiles.ini file. We will now edit a few things to load our Mozilla Firefox backup folder ff-backup.
  9. Set IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0 since its not inside the C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\ folder. We then place the path of our Mozilla Firefox backup folder ff-backup which in my case will be C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Desktop\ff-backup.
    Save the profiles.ini file.

Run Mozilla Firefox and test to see if we have all of our settings and extensions from our backup folder ff-backup!

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More information:

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Firefox

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