How to keep/back up my entire Firefox profile, including the saved passwords

Question

I am using Ubuntu, and I need to reinstall it. I have tons of sites for which Firefox manages my access credentials. How do I back it up and reattach it to the Firefox installation I'll have after I finished with the formatting and re-installing of Ubuntu?

Answer 1

All profile data for Firefox is kept in the profile folder in your home directory. That is the folder you need to back up.

Answer 2

Although it is always good to back up, Firefox has the option to retain your settings in case you wanted to reinstall it. So simply uninstalling then reinstalling Firefox should be sufficient.

However, like MaQleod said, it would be good to backup that folder (probably .mozilla or .firefox in your home directory) first.

Answer 3

I have Fedora, but I think it is similar. You should backup the whole directory ~/.mozilla/firefox. There is profiles.ini which contains the name of your profile and profile folder. In my installation, it looks like mvwmwhhl.default.

When you reinstall, Firefox creates a new profile with another profile name and profiles.ini. You need only replace profiles.ini with the older from your backup and restore your older profile folder.

Answer 4

The FEBE extension (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is great for this. Very simple, can be set to a schedule, and can selectively back up extensions, bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, ... for transfer to another installation.

Answer 5

Firefox Sync should do the trick - it works on most common Mozilla versions, and backs up and restores everything fairly simply and automatically to/from a server.