see.

• Recovering important data from an old profile

Thanks. Unfortunately, the organization of the profile on the saved directory bears little resemblance to the organization used by version 23. Had I backed up my profile, there would not be a problem. Regretably, I did not.

What would work for me would be to somehow direct firefox to the old directory, i.e., /backup/home/user, from which firefox would pick up the profile contents.

Your folder names are different than what I see on Windows, but what you find under .cache probably is not your profile folder, but only the companion cache folder. Do you have anything more like:

~/.mozilla/firefox/qy6upj4t.default/

(Not sure what the ~ represents, but I have read that .mozilla is a hidden directory.)

Yes. I have ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/qy6upj4t.default/ (~ represents the user's home directory) However, the contents of this directory are not the same as the version 23 directory.

How old is that "earlier version of firefox"?

Firefox 4.0 and newer should pose no problem, and Firefox 3.0, 3.5, and 3.6 versions should be similar as far as the bookmarks and password files, but there are multiple differences in other files with the 4.0-plus files.

That "Recovering important data ..." support article mentions 11 specific files and one folder, which of those 12 items are you having a problem with?

About the only thing you can "direct" Firefox to restore from a folder is the bookmarks-yyyy-mm-dd.json backup files in the \bookmarkbackups\ folder in that old Profile folder. All other files need to be transferred manually via copy'n'paste replacing the existing files in the new Profile folder.

I've been using Firefox since it was Mozilla, so that would be quite a while :-) Sorry, no idea of what the version was.

Regretably, I don't have any of the files mentioned in the "Recovering important data ..." article. My ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/qy6upj4t.default/ directory has these subdirectories: Cache/ _CACHE_CLEAN_ OfflineCache/ safebrowsing/ startupCache/ thumbnails/

The "~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/<profile>" directory is the location of the cache folder as you can see by its name (more programs have their cache here).
The main profile folder is in "~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/", so if you didn't backup this folder then the data stored here is gone.

I have a full backup of my home directory. Including "~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/". That (default) profile does not conform to the current standards. I assume that it is in a previous format. Any way to deal with that?

What was the last version of Firefox that touched the profile folder? Generally speaking, when you install a new version, the existing data files are migrated or modified to work with the new version. However, it might not be possible to jump from, say, Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 23.

V23. In my case, there is no ~/.mozilla in the backup of my home directory. Instead, there is ~/.cache/.mozilla. I've tried following the instructions on the "Back up and restore ..." page, but they don't work for me. I've also tried starting Firefox in a directory with just the saved .cache directory, and no .mozilla directory. No luck there either. Firefox goes ahead and cireats a new profile.

I'm assuming that the location of the profile files changed at some point, ant my old directory location was accepted for backwards compatibility.

The folder under .cache/mozilla/firefox is useless and you can ignore that.

What you need is the folder from .mozilla/firefox. (Apparently all folders that start with a . are hidden by default, but I assume you have unhidden them.)

If you might have had your profile in a non-default location, you could search globally for a file that should be in the profile, such as places.sqlite and see whether you can discover the folder that way.

Thanks for the assistance. I've resolved my main issue by dumping a bookmarks json file