I've copied %appdata%/mozilla/firefox/profiles/myprofile1 into %appdata%/mozilla/firefox/profiles/myotherprofile2 but if I do a text search inside the files of either profile directory you can see that some files like prefs.js, extensions.ini, extensions.sqlite, search.json, secmod.db, startupCache.4.little or TestPilotErrorLog.log have the string at least myprofile1 embedded and actually in some cases full paths.
Is it safe to leave these as it is?
What is a better way to clone a firefox profile?
Reason: I would like to clone my profile because I would like to measure differences between several Firefox binary versions "in practice", ie. the way I use them, and also the impact of installing specific extensions, although it could be done without the clone (still it would be handy to clone). In future maybe I want to use multiple different firefox versions at the same time due for addon compatibility reasons. I have >100 extensions, would like to avoid to do it manually|febe|history export to retain maximum match.
edit since then I've edited %appdata%/mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini to include my copied profile, now it shows up in profile manager, but I'm concerned about the path values I found in the files, they seemed to be fixed to the original path.
Create Profile,Rename Profile,Delete Profile,Work offline,Don't ask at startup,Start Firefox,Exit, and dominantly a list of my profiles as 'display names'. When I copied my profile folder, the named profile in this list was not duplicated. So either there is a register or index to them, or because of the colliding names it wasn't displayed. I tried to right-click a profile name but nothing happened, while double-right click is the same as double-left click in effect. How to do the recover functionality you speak of?