If you are a frequent surfer, your browser handles a lot of aspects of your surfing, if you happen to lose this data for some reason, restoring all your personal data to its previous state manually can be a real hassle. The data you need consists of bookmarks, passwords and addons (for Firefox) pretty much, this is of course the case with my browsing habits. There are a select amount of internet surfers who don’t really bother with bookmarks and also a good number who are paranoid enough to not save any passwords on your browser, which is, if you are on a shared computer quite a wise move. There’s also a good number of users who like to play around and swap themes often, in that case you might want to keep tabs on your themes too.
In any case, if you are a fellow Firefox user, there are several ways to maintain a backup of your personal data in different locations using different software. I’ve outlined them below:
This is a Firefox add-on that lets you backup all aspects of your Firefox profile, I personally use this add-on (only when I format my computer or looking to try an alpha Firefox release) and I must say it’s very efficient and easy to use. It allows you to select individual aspects and export them separately or export them into a single file type compatible with the FEBE addon to import it back.
It also allows scheduling of backups and also offers more safety with your backups by giving you the option of uploading your backups to the popular box.net file hosting service. It supports backing up and restoring of every single aspect of your Firefox profile.
MozBackup (freeware) is a desktop application for Windows that performs the same function as FEBE, it’s a tiny utility (under 1MB) and maybe downloaded as a portable zip installer so it can be maintained in your Firefox directory and carried around if portability is what you are looking for.
It doesn’t provide as much features however (no scheduling or online synchronization) and also does not work for Mac and Linux.
If you only mind losing bookmarks or passwords, Xmarks would be perfect. Xmarks is an add-on as well and works silently in the background keeping your bookmarks and passwords (optional) synchronized with the Xmarks online server. For more information on the add-on you can checkout the post on Xmarks I recently covered.
The above addons and software pretty much makes things easier and automate the process of backing up and restoring your Firefox data/profile, however if you prefer doing things the hard way or just want to ‘know the ropes’ the Firefox knowledge base covers manual backing up and restoring in their very comprehensive knowledge base.
Those are the most popular methods to maintain a backup of your Firefox profile, personally I use Xmarks and maintain a permanent backup of my bookmarks online only however depending on how safe you want to play it the above tools and methods should come in handy. Be sure to leave your comments on the tools and suggest any other similar tools or methods in the comments.
People who read this post also read:
Did you like this article?
Please Share This Article:
Subscribe for future
updates for free by RSS
or
Email
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Any "names" that are keywords will be deleted.
