Lost my profile in a crash, how do I move/store my profile on E: drive instead of C:
The title says it all. I'm frustrated after losing everything including my firefox profile which was located on my C: drive. I had moved other things like My Documents to E:, so I saved all of that, as well as emails, etc. Now I need to setup my new profile to be stored on that drive as well, to guard against loss in the next failure.
I've seen other posts and articles about moving to another computer but I haven't found anything about storing on another drive.
I have XP pro SP3. I have an SSD (C:) and 2 disks (E: 1T, and F: 500Gb). Thank you!
All Replies (5)
hello 26kick, you can use the profile manager to create your profile in a custom location: Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles
Hi Philipp,
Thanks for responding. I did see that option, but it doesn't exactly address my issue. It's close though and will work in a pinch.
Specifically, I would like to move my current, albeit very new profile, not create a new one in another location. Unless I missed it, there are no instructions for moving your current profile to another location.
I suppose I could create a new profile on E:, then copy the profile folder contents of my current profile, and paste if over the new profile contents. Is that the recommended way?
Thanks!
yes, creating a new profile in the desired location and then pasting the content of your current profile into it should work well and is probably the easier way.
alternatively you can also manually edit the file which holds the information on where firefox will attempt to access its profile: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profiles.ini_file
Cool, another couple questions for clarification please.... There will be the current profile on C: and also the new one on E:, so will Firefox immediately start using that new profile, or do I have to specify which profile to use, or when to switch when Firefox starts back up? Is there a way to switch back and forth?
If this happens in the future, how then could I direct a new install of Firefox to start using this profile that will be located on E:. For example, OE6 has a place in Options where you can select your "store folder". All you have to do is point it there and it starts using all of my old folders, inbox, sent, etc. I wish Firefox had something this easy.
Actually, I'm thinking once I'm on the new profile, all I can do it try to import bookmarks that I saved from 4 years ago, so that's all I will do at this point, since I don't have a recent profile backup anywhere.
Thanks!
Note that Firefox will still locate the profiles.ini file on the system drive in:
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\
To prevent using profiles.ini would require to create desktop shortcut with an absolute profile path, but would cause problems if you try to launch Firefox by clicking a link in another program and Firefox isn't running yet.
So you need to set up both versions and make sure that the Profile Manager has selected your profile on the E drive as the default profile.
Modified by cor-el