Need to recover FF passwords bookmarks etc from backup of a system that no longer runs.
The motherboard of the old system, which ran XP, was ruined by a power surge, so I cannot boot from that system to export anything. Since then I have been using a system running newly installed Win 7 with the latest FF. The two versions of FF were synced about six months before the power surge, and I have been using the Win 7 system for a couple of months since the power surge. So what I really want to do is merge the changes I have made to my login info since the power surge into the login info I had before the power surge. I have kept bookmarks I made since the power surge in a separate folder on the new system.
Is there a way to run both the old FF and the new FF in separate accounts on the new Win 7 system? And would that allow me to export login info and bookmarks between the versions of FF?
Many thanks! Lloyd
All Replies (4)
You should be able to sign into the old account (bearing in mind that resetting your Firefox Account password will erase any Firefox Sync information on that account. Then you can sync the data to your browser and logout of that Firefox Account. When you log back into your current Firefox Account, the newly added information should be copied to Firefox Sync and shared with your other devices.
If you are concerned about losing information on your current browser, I'd strongly recommend backing up your current data before attempting to merge the two sets of data together.
Hope this helps.
Wesley, Thanks very much for your reply, but I am confused.
Are you saying that the answer to my first question is "yes": > Is there a way to run both the old FF and the new FF > in separate accounts on the new Win 7 system?
I am aware that a single Windows user can have multiple accounts within Firefox, but I have not worked with more than one before. When I began using my new Win 7 system, I was told that I could simply copy the Thunderbird profile from the old Win XP disk to replace the contents of the profile on my new installation, and I did that successfully. At the time I assumed that I could not do the same thing for FF because of the radical changes that have been made to FF since the final update that was available on XP.
I found several help pages on Mozilla Support that show how to work with and restore multiple FF accounts, but I did not see anything about restoring accounts from old (or different) versions of FF: 1) Profile Manager - Create, remove, or switch Firefox profiles 2) Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles 3) Recovering important data from an old profile
So that is all there is to it? Just alternately logging on to each version of FF and let FF sync do the rest?
Thanks so much! Lloyd
I assume that I have correctly interpreted your original question. You were using Firefox 52 on a different computer and it was synced to a Firefox Sync Account. You are also using the current Firefox on a different computer and it was synced to a separate Firefox Sync Account. Now your computer running Firefox 52 stopped working and you want to merge the data in the two Firefox Sync Accounts together.
Is that correct?
If your data is still on the Firefox Sync service, it should be as easy as logging out of your current Firefox Account and into the old Firefox Account. Then the old data should be transferred onto your browser. Then, when you log back into your current Firefox Account, the data that's on your browser (both from the old Firefox and the new Firefox at this point) should be transferred to the Firefox Sync service, essentially merging the two together.
Theoretically, if you have the profile folder from your Windows XP computer, you could copy that to your new computer since I don't think much about the profile has changed since Firefox 52. The only thing you would lose are the extensions, which aren't recoverable anyway. If you chose this route, you would need to make a secondary Firefox profile to copy the old data into and then manually export your logins and export your bookmarks to an HTML file so that you can import them into your new Firefox profile.
However, like I said above, I would recommend backing up your current data first to make sure that you don't lose anything that you currently have, in the event that everything takes a wrong turn.
Hope this helps.
Modified by Wesley Branton
That does not answer the questions I have been trying to ask. I have tried to reduce the problem to several questions that just need simple yes or no answers. I appreciate Wesley's discussions of the issue, but are you avoiding answering the questions because you do not know the answers, or do you not understand the questions?
I have stated the problem as clearly as I can. I do not know how to describe it any more clearly without repeating what I have already written:
What do I have to do to get the FF passwords, bookmarks, etc. off an old disk from an XP system that will no longer boot. Is it necessary to get another computer and install Win XP on it along with that version of FF that would run on XP in order to export or sync the data from my old install of FF onto my new Win 7 system?
Please, I would greatly appreciate help from someone who is able to answer the questions.