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Backup my full profile folder automatically with symlinks?

Dakara
Dakara
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Hi,

Not long ago my firefox on my laptop crashed and i could not get my old profile back and running again, so i decided to fully reinstall firefox from scratch on the laptop. Most of the addons and bookmarks were re-added due to the logged in profile.

Long story short, i want to prevent that i cannot access my profile anymore after a crash so i want to automatically backup the profile folder to a different folder (like a cloud folder for example). I have a FreeFileSync automatic backup setup but it requires to constantly run, it fills up my bin for all the files that keeps being updated by firefox and some file could not be backed up when firefox is open.

So i found symbolic links were you sort of make shortcuts to files and have the actual files in a different folder location. Can this be done with the firefox profile folder or will this screw up the profile?

Alternatively if the above can't be done, is there a way to move the firefox folder to a cloud based folder (for example dropbox) without any re setting things up? So when firefox is updating files within the folder it instantly gets backed up to the cloud?

Thanks in advance

Hi, Not long ago my firefox on my laptop crashed and i could not get my old profile back and running again, so i decided to fully reinstall firefox from scratch on the laptop. Most of the addons and bookmarks were re-added due to the logged in profile. Long story short, i want to prevent that i cannot access my profile anymore after a crash so i want to automatically backup the profile folder to a different folder (like a cloud folder for example). I have a FreeFileSync automatic backup setup but it requires to constantly run, it fills up my bin for all the files that keeps being updated by firefox and some file could not be backed up when firefox is open. So i found symbolic links were you sort of make shortcuts to files and have the actual files in a different folder location. Can this be done with the firefox profile folder or will this screw up the profile? Alternatively if the above can't be done, is there a way to move the firefox folder to a cloud based folder (for example dropbox) without any re setting things up? So when firefox is updating files within the folder it instantly gets backed up to the cloud? Thanks in advance

All Replies (1)

Wesley Branton
Wesley Branton
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Generally speaking, I'd say that you aren't going to find a service that will allow you to instantly backup your Firefox profile folder every time there is an update to a file. This is simply because Firefox is constantly updating files when it's running, so you'd be flooding the cloud service with constant new versions of files, not to mention you've be severely slowing down your internet by transferring these files.

I'd recommend some sort of scheduled backup instead of real-time. Nevertheless, you should be able to use FreeFileSync without issues.

Firstly, you want to always make sure that you are either using Update or Mirror as your backup options, never Two Way. That way you are never making changes to the original files in the Firefox profile folder, so of which you cannot write to anyway while Firefox is open.

As for your "bin" being filled up, I assume you are referring to the Recycle Bin? This can easily be remedied by changing the FreeFileSync settings to either Permanently Delete or Versioning.

As for the actually backup option, as mentioned above, I don't recommend real-time. The better option is to setup the file sync options and then save it as a batch job and schedule it to run periodically via the Windows Task Scheduler.

Hope this helps.