Backing Up Firefox

A couple of weeks ago, the Ur-Guru helped me reinstall my main computer, Enheduanna. (Alas, I can’t blame the hiatus in backup reminders on that, but I do have to admit that this tour-guide business leaves me a lot less time for blogging.) One of the things he pointed out in the course of installing software was that I could save myself time on the next reinstall if I backed up my complete Firefox environment and not just my bookmarks, and he introduced me to the Firefox Environment Backup Extension, or FEBE, by Chuck Baker. (The second link goes to the Firefox add-ons page.)

I don’t use Firefox to save passwords—or I didn’t, much, until recently—but I rely on several Firefox extensions, like the All in One Sidebar, NoScript, Video DownloadHelper, IE Tab, Screengrab, and ColorZilla—not to mention Delicious Bookmarks for Firefox.

FEBE lets you back up your add-ons an other extensions, your bookmarks, and a whole lot more. You can back up your themes, if you use custom themes for Firefox (I stopped bothering a while ago; keeping up with themes for WordPress is enough trouble), your preferences, usernames and passwords, search plugins, history, permissions, cookies…the list goes on. You can even opt to back up a copy of the FEBE extension in your backup directory.

FEBE backs up on a schedule—daily, weekly, or monthly—or at startup or shutdown of Firefox. The Ur-Guru’s recommendation is a weekly backup. For this initial phase where I’m rebuilding cookies and form-fill data, daily might be better, but I’m not likely to lose too much if I miss a week.

If you have a Box.net account, you can use FEBE to back up your Firefox environment online. The free account is plenty big enough to hold a Firefox backup.

Backing up with FEBE is very simple. Restoring is a little trickier. While it looks as though you can just select Tools | FEBE | Restore | Restore Profile from the Menu bar, you can’t restore the profile you’re using while using that profile in Firefox. (Well, it does make sense if you think about it.) Instead you have to go through a somewhat more complex process in order to either create a new profile or overwrite the existing profile from outside of Firefox.

1. Close Firefox if open.
2. Browse to your backup destination directory.
3. Rename your profile backup file to a zip file. Example: Rename “profile{default}.fbu” to “profile{default}.zip”.
4. Open the renamed file and extract it to your Firefox profile folder. In your profiles folder you will see one or more individual profile folders named something like “pqf85hp8.default” or “y3f5nnr4.Chuck”. The first part of the name is a random string of characters and the last part is the name of the profile you want to restore. You want to extract the zip file into the individual profile directory. If asked, you do want to replace existing files during the extraction.

This seems, at first glance, a bit like walking on water, but that’s really only because the paths and folder names are such gibberish. I followed the directions and it worked perfectly. When I restarted Firefox less than 5 minutes later, it even restored my last session.

If I wanted to, I could also use FEBE to replicate my Firefox setup on my other two computers, Mena and Star, and I may yet do that.

There’s a support forum for help with problems.

I definitely recommend this tool, but perhaps not for the completely non-technical.

For those people, there’s MozBackup by Pavel Cvrcek. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce that. I thought “Goetsch” was difficult.) It, too, backs up your extensions, bookmarks, cookies, form fill details, passwords, certificates, and settings—not just for Firefox, but also for Thunderbird and other Mozilla software. It will even back up files it doesn’t recognize, including those created by FEBE.

To run MozBackup, you need to shut down Firefox and all other Mozilla programs. Then run MozBackup, which will give you the choice to either back up or restore a profile, and list the programs whose profiles you can back up (or restore). My choices are Firefox and “portable applications,” whatever that means. I chose Firefox and the default (only) profile, backed it up to my F drive, and then restored it. Quick and easy. The only down side is that there’s no scheduler, so you have to remember to run the backups yourself. But if you use Thunderbird as well as Firefox, I’d definitely recommend it.

With more and more of our computing experiences taking place “in the cloud,” backups for our browsers are becoming more important. And even though I’ve started keeping most of my bookmarks on Delicious, I’ve also “pimped out” Firefox with extensions I didn’t use a few years ago. (Hope that doesn’t leave the e-mail version of this reminder stuck in the spam filters.)

FEBE works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. MozBackup is Windows only. Both are completely free.

What about the Safari, Opera, and MSIE users out there? Do you have a favorite browser backup tool? Leave a comment and let us know, or send me a guest post: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.