How To Backup Firefox

During a recent change in laptops, I was reminded of one of my favorite freeware programs that it always amazes me how few people know about: MozBackup.

One of the biggest pains when moving computers is setting up your browsers again just the way you want them.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve customized the heck out of Firefox with a couple of extensions, gotten your dictionary just the way you want it (oddly enough, dictionaries don’t usually know all the Web 2.0 site names …) and so on.  Thankfully MozBackup takes care of all these problems not only for Firefox, but for any Mozilla-based application such as Flock and Thunderbird.

It only takes a couple of steps to complete, with the only annoyance being that the program you are backing up can’t be running at the time.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the program, fire it up and just follow the easy steps of the wizard to do your task.  First off you’re going to pick which program you are backing up, and “Backup a profile” is the default selection.

The next screen will ask you which profile you wish to backup from Firefox.  You can also choose where you would like profile to be stored.  This is important as you want it to be somewhere easy to remember.

Once you’ve clicked on “Next”, all of the potential boxes will be check marked, and you can uncheck any that don’t interest you.  I always go for all of them as I don’t see any reason not to.

Next it goes through an automatic process that really doesn’t take all that long to complete.

And that’s it, you’re done.  You have a backed up copy of all the important parts of Firefox.  You can then send it over to your new computer, e-mail it to your work computer or whatever you want to do with it.

To restore a profile, you simply install MozBackup on the other computer, select “Restore” as opposed to the default, locate the file and then follow the wizard steps again.  The whole process, including the restore, probably takes less than five minutes, and that’s a heck of a lot less than rebuilding Firefox from scratch.  It’s also nice to store a copy of the backup somewhere other than your computer in case of a crash.

Our highest possible recommendation to this program if you are a Firefox user.

What say you?  Have you ever used MozBackup?  Do you plan to?