Firefox is a feature rich browser and can also be called as your online home. Online home, because everything from bookmarks, saved passwords, addons and settings, all are stored in Firefox. You may face problem if you have to format the Computer because of any reason, because formatting will delete everything. But the good part is that we can backup bookmarks, installed Add-ons, Saved passwords and settings and there is really an easy way to do this.
How to backup Firefox Bookmarks, Addons, Passwords and Settings
Doing backup of all these things is not rocket science. There are two methods to do this.
1) Manually and
2) Using an application named as MozBackup.
First let’s understand how to do this manually. The magic word is Firefox Profiles. All these settings, bookmarks, etc are stored in a special folder named as “profile”. This is kept separate from the program,
so that your information is always safe. You can also uninstall Firefox, without losing your settings. So where does this “profile” folder located ?
To browse to this folder, click on Windows Start button, and type this: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\, and press Enter.
If you are using Windows XP, then type that in Run (Press Ctrl + R). Copy this complete folder and paste it somewhere safe (in flash drive or in some other place), and you’ve just taken a backup. That’s done. Now when you want to restore all your Firefox bookmarks, passwords and settings, firstly paste this folder in the same place, and then install Firefox. On starting Firefox for the first time, you’ll observe that all your settings/data are restored. Cool trick, right. This method is very useful is something is messed up, and you can’t start Windows. Just boot from a Linux live CD like Ubuntu, and navigate to this path:
c:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (and copy and paste this in flash drive)
Using MozBackup to Backup Firefox
Now let’s take a look at the second method, by using Mozbackup. MozBackup is really a small and very useful tool to take backup of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Suite and Netscape profiles and the best part is that its a freeware.
Download MozBackup from here, and install it. After installing, double click on the MozBackup icon from the desktop. A wizard will start, press Next. In the second step, it will ask you what to backup. Select Mozilla Firefox and press Next.
Now select the profile to backup. In most cases, it should be “default” only. Also you can change the path to where the backup file will be stored. By default, it will be stored on “My documents”. If you want to change this path, then click on “Browse”, and select a new location to save the backup file. After doing this, press Next. It will ask you whether you want to password protect the backup file. Its your wish what you want to do here.
Select what you want to backup. Its recommended to go with the default settings, so that it will take backup of General settings, bookmarks, history, saved passwords, etc. Press “Next”.
The last screen. Your backup is created and it will show you the details of what that backup file contains. Just click on “Finish”.
Now don’t forget to copy and paste this backup file to some secure place like flash drive or burn it on CD/DVD. So that whenever the need arises, you already have the backup ready.
So do you take backup of Mozilla Firefox ? If no, then do so now. Who knows when the disaster strikes and all your settings, saved passwords, bookmarks are gone. Therefore, follow any of the above method, and take backup of Firefox.
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