How to move a Firefox profile to new user?

[rebadurchee]

First, owing to my own ignorance and arrogance, I completely hosed my main user account. I created another one which is able to run my programs.

I want to move my Firefox profile from my old user to my new user. I went to the Mozilla support site but either I didn't understand or the info was wrong. According to those instructions I created a new profile in the new user and then copied the profile from olduser\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles to newuser\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles. According to what I read, this was to solve the issue. Not. Obviously there is a lot I don't understand.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[DeaconFrost]

I've seen people link to a program called Mozbackup that does exactly what you want.

 

[A Guy]

Perhaps some help for you:

Profiles

Moving your profile folder - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

A Guy

 

[rebadurchee]

Thanks, A Guy,

I just don't know what to say. I started doing computers in CP/M days. I've gone through all flavors of DOS and Windows. I've built my own rigs, done BASIC, FORTRAN, and written my own dBase programs. I have never been so confounded and frustrated as I have since I've encountered Win7.

Those Mozilla pages are where I've been and what I've done and done and done. All that happened is that after I followed the steps as described Firefox started up with theme that I had in the old profile and then went non-responsive with a blank tab.

The instructions call for copying "the" profile folder. Well, as far as I can tell Win 7 has two profile folders, one Local and one in Roaming. There is no mention of this at Mozilla. I only found out by poking around the user directories myself, which is a dangerous thing.

At long last I got the idea of copying each to each. That finally worked.

 

[SoxmisUK]

My personal favorite for backing up and easily recovering Firefox profiles is FEBE which is gotten from the add ons page at Mozilla.. You can backup to a seperate drive or even a USB and recover at anytime either the whole profile or just selected parts of it.

You can also keep profiles from many different dates and easily recover something from months ago.

FEBE has it's own support page too but it's not rocket science to use and is very useful once installed.

That should help.

 

[Lemur]

Bookmark -> Organize Bookmark -> Import and Backup

 

[rebadurchee]

Thanks for your replies. I'll try them. Firefox is now completely non-functional. It worked last night. This morning, with no intervening action on my part, it starts with a blank tab and goes into non-responsive mode and I have to end it with Task Manager.

I don't know if I should uninstall Firefox entirely, delete all the profiles and try FEBE or what. Is there some overview of how Win7 works that I can look at? Clearly my XP knowledge is dangerous. Win7 is a highly complex OS and I shouldn't be mucking around in it, but now that I have blundered into the center of it I don't know how to make it work.

 

[Lemur]

It might be best to completely uninstall FF, delete directories/profiles. Reinstall.

**EDIT**
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_firefox

 

[WindowsStar]

Here is the trick go to:

..\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ar73ferer.default <-- Old

Your xxxxxxxx.default will be different than mine.

Copy all to:

..\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\am66xklm.default <-- New

Then edit:

With notepad edit the "paths" in the files in that directory. (There are a few that need editing, you will have to look at them one by one, I may have some you don't and vice versa.) Some files are not text files, just skip them.

Then go to:

..\<username>\AppData\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile.ini

and edit the profile.ini file to match your new xxxxxxxxx.default file name.

That should make it work. -WS

 

[rebadurchee]

I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. I uninstalled Firefox from my current user (Admin rights). Then I went into two of the three users I have and deleted the Mozilla folder from Appdata directory. The last user, Admin rights also, won't allow me to do that because I need admin rights, even when I'm logged on as that user, which has admin rights.

Then I reinstalled FF. I went through the Mozilla support page steps to add a profile. It worked!!.... once. The second time I started it the program went non-responsive again. I did it again. Same thing. I rebooted, same thing: works once (meaning it loaded saved tabs) and not the second time (meaning just blank tabs and the endless circle turning). Rebooted. Works once and not the second time.

Uninstalled FF and all private data again (saved profile from my old rig in 7z file). With no attempt to change profile I've started FF four times now with saved tabs on a clean new profile.

FF is available to user 2 but not to user 1, the contaminated one, the one that won't allow me to delete the Mozilla folders. It still had FF icons on the taskbar and desktop but they don't do anything, even though FF is installed through user 3.

So I deleted user 1 account. Then I copied old profile to profiles folders. I tried running 'firefox -p' in the Run window and FF the browser started, not the profile manager. What gives? I'm doing everything the Mozilla site says and my rig does things differently. A two week old rig.

Then I edited profiles.ini to the name of the old profile. Crashes again. Reboot. Works once, crashes on the second opening of the program.

What am I doing wrong? I've spent almost 50 hours trying to get this machine to be workable. I thought I'd done okay by establishing a new Admin user account and deleting the contaminated one.

There seems no way to get my old profile into FF so that I can use it, at least not with the info on the Mozilla site. Or am I not implementing it correctly? Should I wipe the disk and start over?

 

[Lemur]

Next time you uninstall, reboot into Safe Mode. You should then be able to delete the dang folder.

 

[rebadurchee]

Folder not found. Problem remains.

 

[A Guy]

I hate to say it, but your install is buggy to say the least. If the repair install did not work, you are looking at a clean install to fix this, and your other issues. A Guy

 

[mikedl]

After a clean install and starting FF without any initial changes (to get the new profile going) can't you then close out of FF and copy in the old profile? Or is that what you've been doing? It seems as if you have taken more steps than necessary.

As WindowStar mentioned, the new data will be in a folder similar to: Users>NewUser>AppData>Roaming>Mozilla>Firefox>Profiles>something.default

Copy the contents of your old user xxxx.default folder to the folder mentioned above and restart FF after also editing the profiles.ini and copying the Local folder files (described momentarily). I couldn't find any pathing changes that needed to be done as WindowStar also mentioned. WidowStar's reference to "..\<username>\AppData\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.ini" should have read "..\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.ini

Profiles.ini appears thus:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/change to match the something folder name above for the new user.default
Default=1
If you have set any additional profiles up they will appear below
[Profile1]
Name=test
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/cb5flbql.test

[Profile2]
Name=test2
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/ycushnrc.test2

You will also have to do the same thing for the folder in "Users>NewUser>AppData>Local>Mozilla>Firefox>Profiles>something.default" but there will be no ini file to edit.