backup firefox bookmark and other personal files bash script

Question

i am migrating from windows to ubuntu for my personal desktop and i want to know an easy way to backup personal data such as firefox bookmark, personal documents, etc....

in windows i copy everything manually and in my ubuntu i want to create a bash script to automatically.

i have no knowledge of bash script experience other than create a file and make it executable and this:

#!/bin/bash
cp /files/file.doc /media/flashdrive/

now, my problem is the firefox bookmark, how can i automatically detect my current profile? (i have 3 profile in my computer currently, 1 old i dont use, 1 for my wife which has no bookmark and mine)

Answer 1

I would recommend to use rsync (In Ubuntu).

If you have hundreds of megs of data, you might only want to sync/backup the modified one. This will increase the backup speed.

As of other files like hosts you can simply cp

Now for the firefox, you need to find which profile you are using from the profiles.ini then you can copy the bookmarks.html

You can use grep to find out what's the folder the profiles.ini use:

grep Path ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

that will output:

Path=e8tog617.default

Then remove the Path=

sed "s/Path=//g"

Here's what the backup.sh will look like:

rsync -rltDqv ~/Documents/ /media/flashdrive/Documents/
cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/`grep Path ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini | sed "s/Path=//g"`/bookmarks.html /media/flashdrive/bookmarks.html
cp /etc/hosts /media/flashdrive/hosts

Now, chmod +x your backup.sh and then run it ./backup

Answer 2

For Firefox, I think you can use Firefox's "Sync" feature to sync your profiles.

For backup documents, you can also try some software like unison or FreeFileSync.