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Presently running Windows XP on my old computer. Bought myself a new computer running Windows 7 64-bit. I'd like to know what's the easiest, safest way to transfer all my settings, add-ons, plugins & themes from Firefox, from one computer to the next. Does just copying the profile from the old computer do the trick? Or how about Magic Transfer? Or FavBackup? Or MozBackup? Or is this just not possible? Firefox is presently downloaded & installed on the Windows 7 computer, waiting for me to make a move. Both versions are the same.

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6 Answers

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I used MozBackup without any problems.

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Aye! I second that! – Don Salva Nov 29 '09 at 20:11
This doesn't seem to work on Firefox 12. – galacticninja May 17 '12 at 10:01
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I personally use XMarks, an add-on that will sync your bookmarks with a copy in your repository. You can then register multiple computers with the Xmarks account, and they will all have the same bookmarks. Note that if you bookmark a URL at work, which is not available from the net, it will not work, but you can also have different profiles, and sync based on those profiles.

Xmarks saved me so many hours of retyping and emailing of URLs.......

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up vote 2 down vote

I've always just copied the profile from one Windows user directory to the other. Never had a problem.

The only extra step is when copying a profile from Windows to Ubuntu; there's a text file listing the profiles (in ~/.mozilla/firefox/) that I updated manually. I'm not sure if that's actually necessary.

See the official Mozilla Profile support page for how to locate the profile, as well as the official how-to for backing up and restoring a profile.

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The nice thing about copying the profile is you also copy over all your sqlite files, including places and forms data. This is both a good and bad thing depending upon how your use firefox. Since I rely upon completion within the awesome bar, having my places database intact is very useful. – Darren Hall Nov 30 '09 at 16:54
up vote 2 down vote

FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile). You can selectively restore only the items you need.

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up vote 3 down vote

You can also now use the built-in Firefox Sync.

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up vote 0 down vote
  • Copy whole profile to new computer
  • Keep profiles in sync with Firefox Sync (built in since 4.0 i think) if you still want to use the old machine (but generally no bad idea in terms of backups)
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