Word of Advice: Back Up ALL Your Firefox Settings

I’ve been using the Firefox web browser for months now, and I love it. However, yesterday I was about ready to tear my hair out. Here’s what happened. I’m sharing this so you can learn from my experience and easily prevent similar frustration…

As you might expect, I keep an extensive, complex list of bookmarks in Firefox. I also store many passwords there. And I employ several extensions (such as Sage and EditCSS) to provide the extra functionality I desire. I’ve also extensively customized my display preferences for text and other aspects of web browsing.

Yesterday, I accidentally popped the battery out of my iBook laptop (an annoying problem, it’s happened before). The computer was asleep at the time. I popped the battery back in and restarted.

To my dismay, Firefox had reverted completely to its default settings. It lost my list of bookmarks, my custom toolbars, my display settings, my stored passwords, and my extensions.

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!

I’m not sure why this happened, but it was a major hassle. Fortunately only Firefox and none of my other programs or documents were stricken with amnesia.

Just a couple of days ago I upgraded to the brand-new version of Firefox for Mac OS X (1.0.1). That upgrade went smoothly – all my settings, extensions, and bookmarks carried over effortlessly. I don’t know whether that upgrade also caused this recent bout of browser amnesia. It’s possible, I suppose. I’ve accidentally ejected my battery before that upgrade, with no similar browser disasters.

Anyway, it took me awhile to get my browser reconfigured. I’d saved my bookmarks, but that was more than a month ago – so after I imported that old list I had to add some bookmarks, and I’m sure I missed some things.

LESSON 1: Export your bookmark list weekly. Save that file to your computer and to a server or backup media. Automate this process if you can. Otherwise put it on your calendar with an automatic reminder.

I use the Firefox extension Sage as my primary webfeed reader. I am subscribed to more than 400 feeds, all carefully categorized. I add and delete feeds daily. This is one of my most crucial online tools.

LESSON 2: Export your feed list as an OPML file at least weekly, or more frequently if required. Save it on your computer and on backup media. Again, automate this process if you can, or put a reminder on your calendar if not.

For me, the most frustrating part of this recovery process has been my browser settings and stored passwords. If there’s a way to save or export this data, I haven’t found it.

I’ve tweaked my browser settings and stored many passwords gradually and didn’t take notes. I forgot most of what I did. But once Firefox reverted to default settings, I kept noticing things that bugged me. It was a hassle trying to figure out exactly how I’d set my browser preferences before.

LESSON 3: Keep a running list of stored passwords and changes you’ve made to your browser preferences. This can be a simple text file. Any time you tweak your browser in a way that satisfies your needs, write down what you did – and how. Again, save that file to your computer and on some backup media.

These are now my new practices. Had I been doing this earlier, I would have saved myself a couple of hours yesterday…. Sigh….

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on March 3, 2005 at 9:10 am and filed under Amy's Adventures, Resources. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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11 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Interesting. I, too, did the 1.0.1 Firefox update for my Windows-98-running PC, and a few days later, my bookmarks were suddenly gone. I managed to recover some from my history. I’ve now made a copy of my profile folder, in case it disappears again. That Pikey thing looks good though.

1. Qootoo on March 10th, 2005 at 2:45 am
I’m rather disappointed in Firefox. When I signed up several months ago, I couldn’t export my bookmarks from IE. Didn’t want to download a bookmark manager to do it.

Then, there are times when Firefox can’t retrieve much, so I go to IE, and it surfs fine.

Then, about two months ago, I got a message about Default browser settings or some rot, and poof! all my extensions were gone, and all the new Firefox bookmarks disappeared.

It was like Mozilla took away my customized Firefox, replaced it with a stripped down version, then when I went to the extensions site, most were no longer available, like SpoofStick.

What say ye?

2. Steven Streight on March 10th, 2005 at 2:38 am
You might like to check out MozBackup at http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
He has stopped development now, but it’s pretty great anyway. This will back up and restore a whole range of things from your Firefox Profile.
Regards,

Jonathan Evatt
http://www.feal.org

3. Jonathan Evatt on March 9th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
For Firefox Users
An interesting post and comments about using Firefox

http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2005/03/03/advice-back-up-all-firefox-settings

4. Ping Planning on March 9th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
Lesson 4: Don’t be a muppet and eject your battery - what did you expect?

5. Anonymous on March 9th, 2005 at 9:10 am
- I’ll look for Ghost 9. There is also a free tool to daily backup : SyncBack (and a more powerful version : SyncBackSE for ‘only’ 15 dollars) “that helps you backup, synchronise, and restore your files to the same drive, a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc), an FTP server, a Network, or Zip archive”, according to the product description at http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub.html
- Sage can be much colourfull with some Firefox themes : e.g. “Saferfox Xpanded” avalaible via MozillaUpdate page, with the white and blue Mac aqua background…
- And if you lose your entire hard drive in the case of a Windows crash or virus corruption, you can always take a linux live-cd to copy your personal files to a CD, DVD, USB media storage, etc. : with any installation, you have a complete linux O.S., and you can even surf safely with Mozilla or Firefox. The most famous one is Knoppix : see http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

6. Jerome on March 4th, 2005 at 8:40 am
I found this article via The Office Weblog. The interesting thing I got out of this article is “Sage.” What a neat little extension. Like someone said, it’s just enough but not too much.

I’ve been playing around with several RSS readers, most recently FeedDemon and Onfolio — I always seemed to go back to RSS Bandit, though. Sage doesn’t do as much as Onfolio (which makes sense since being an RSS reader is not Onfolio’s main purpose), but as a feed reader, for some reason Sage just looks more…I don’t know…elegant (even if it’s less colorful). And, it’s faster and much less resource intensive. I really like it, so far.

As far as backups, I’m with Marc Orchant: I backup my entire hard drive on a regular basis. I’ve tried all of the partial solutions, such as DataKeeper and other file backup/syncing applications that just backup subsets of data, but at the end of the day the easiest, least time-consuming, and most effective solution has been to make a disk image on a regular basis. I currently use Symantec’s Drive Image (it used to be PowerQuest before Symantec bought them) — which has been replaced by (or renamed as) Ghost 9, I believe. It’s a huge application compared to other disk imaging solutions, but at least it lets you image your drive while Windows is running (many other applications still require you to run them from DOS or from outside Windows). Once a week, everything on my primary hard drive gets imaged to an external drive.

You only lost Firefox data this time, so it’s natural to focus on how to back up that data. Next time, however, it may be your whole hard drive that you lose. Creating an image on a regular basis addresses all of those problems.

7. Scott on March 4th, 2005 at 4:02 am
I don’t understand why people don’t use a stand-alone bookmark manager/PIM. I’ve been using Compass for 7 years and have 14,000 URLs carefully cataloged in a PW-protected file that is less than 1MB and easily transportable between boxes (with the Compass app) with a flash drive.
Compass: http://www.softgauge.com/compass/

8. Mike on March 3rd, 2005 at 8:08 pm
Thanks for mentioning that extension, Jerome! It seems to be just what I need. I just installed it, haven’t had a chance to really explore it yet, but if it works as advertised it will replace everything in my procedures described above plus some more.

I wish I’d known about this earlier….

- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS

9. Amy Gahran on March 3rd, 2005 at 3:22 pm
You can back up your entire Firefox profile folder and just replace it once data has been erased, it works like a charm. You should be able to do the same with your Thunderbird Profile folder.

For windows:

C:\WINDOWS\Profiles\”your name”\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox

10. gribble on March 3rd, 2005 at 12:54 pm
Hi! Do you know “Bookmark Backup” extension for Firefox? It will backup your bookmarks after each web session in a dedicated folder on your computer to allow you to get them if your Firefox profil file is corrupted : http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/?extension=bb
If you use Sage to read RSS feeds, this extension will back up them too (I don’t know how to use OPML import/export in Sage). And in the option window, you can add another files to the backup, such as your web passwords!

11. Jerome on March 3rd, 2005 at 10:25 am