Back up profile contents copied. Profile contents not seen by firefox
I recently had the joy of having my laptop's hard drive break. I have all my stuff backed up (including my firefox profile) and now I have Windows 10 re-installed on a new internal drive. So I read the instructions on the Mozilla site on how to import a profile but it isn't working. What I backed up was the whole profile from my old drive, and before putting the contents of that folder in a newly-created profile, or the one generated by default after installing firefox (I've tried both), I have made sure to delete everything in the existing profile folder I am copying the backup contents to.
I am also making sure not to start firefox before everything has finished copying.
However, when I start firefox after putting the contents of the backup in the new profile, none of the back up seems to be there. It loads as if I did nothing to the profile folder. None of my bookmarks, saved passwords, history, cookies, or anything is visible to firefox. I checked profiles.ini and everything matches, and even if there's only 1 profile folder, and it's got my backup in it, it still can't see the backup contents.
Is there something I'm not looking at? Please keep in mind I am following this to the T: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
All Replies (2)
How many profile folders do you have in the default location? To open that, you can copy/paste the following shortcut into the Windows search box and press Enter to load it:
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
Normally a new installation will have at least one. Did you add a second one here?
One level up from that, in
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\
The Profiles.ini file informs Firefox of the profile to use. If you copied in an entire profile folder (having, of course, a name unknown to this installation of Firefox), that file would need to be updated.
Actually, to switch the default profile, it's probably easiest to use the Profile Manager. Simply choose the migrated profile and start Firefox there, and that will become the new default profile. See: Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles. (I suggest NOT deleting anything in the Profile Manager, as it's a bit too easy to delete the wrong profile.)