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How to migrate all settings from a Win Vista to a Win 7 PC? Help's instructions to locate my profile lead to an outdated folder.

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  • Last reply by dheasebro

dheasebro
dheasebro
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Firefox Help says the way to get all my Firefox 6.0.1 personal settings to my new PC is to back up my profile on the old (Vista) PC and restore it on the new one. To that end its first step is to locate the profile by entering %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in the Start Menu search box. That leads to one profile with a system-generated folder name and no files newer than prefs.js dated 9/14/10; all others except for cookies.txt are from 2007. That can't be my profile! I have bookmarks created in the past few weeks and undoubtedly other settings more recent than a year ago. If I'm supposed to close Firefox first just to locate the profile (doesn't say so), it didn't help.

Firefox Help says the way to get all my Firefox 6.0.1 personal settings to my new PC is to back up my profile on the old (Vista) PC and restore it on the new one. To that end its first step is to locate the profile by entering %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in the Start Menu search box. That leads to one profile with a system-generated folder name and no files newer than prefs.js dated 9/14/10; all others except for cookies.txt are from 2007. That can't be my profile! I have bookmarks created in the past few weeks and undoubtedly other settings more recent than a year ago. If I'm supposed to close Firefox first just to locate the profile (doesn't say so), it didn't help.

Modified by dheasebro

All Replies (3)

dheasebro
dheasebro Question owner
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I went back to Help and searched for "back up profile", finding http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles?s=back+up+profile&as=s#w_how-do-i-find-my-profile. That's it! Now I see what was wrong: I had gone to an extraordinary length to get Firefox to store my profile in a location where it will be routinely backed up along with the rest of my data. Other Help instruction pages assume the profile is in the default location. The change in profile location involves editing c:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.ini in Notepad.

dheasebro
dheasebro Question owner
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On further reading the instructions at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Backing%20up%20your%20information, it appears that I no longer need to edit Profiles.ini to establish my preferred profile location.

dheasebro
dheasebro Question owner
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Yup! It works, cleaner than it did several years ago when I installed Firefox under Vista. I'm satisfied.

Maybe those incomplete instructions should be re-directed to the page that did work.