FEBE – Saving a Mozilla Firefox Profile

FEBE extension for saving Mozilla Firefox browser profile. The Mozilla Firefox browser profile stores various browser settings: usernames, passwords, bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, browser extensions, and other files.

In order not to lose your browser settings, in case of any problems, or to use the browser on another computer with all your settings, you need to periodically make a backup copy of the browser profile to save or transfer it.

One way to save a Mozilla Firefox browser profile is to use the FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) extension. This extension saves the complete browser profile or only individual files from the browser profile of your choice.

When using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you can have multiple browser profiles, each with its own settings. Therefore, it is necessary to make a backup copy of the Firefox browser profile – backup its settings, in order to be able to restore Firefox settings, if necessary.

Now let’s look at the FEBE add-on, with which you can save and restore the Mozilla Firefox browser profile.

How to save Firefox preferences

To install the FEBE add-on, you need to click on the “Firefox” button, and in the “Settings” menu, click on the “Add-ons” button. In the search box “Search among extensions” you need to enter the expression “FEBE”. On the extension page, you need to click on the button “Add to Firefox” => “Install now” => “Relaunch now”.

After installing the FEBE extension, you can enter the settings of this add-on along the path “Firefox => “Add-ons” => “Extensions” => “Settings”, or do it in another way, after clicking on the button “Firefox” => “Backup Utilities… » => «FEBE» => «FEBE settings». This will open the FEBE Settings window.

In the “What to Backup” tab, in the “Backup Type” section, you will need to select from the options offered, the type of copy you want to save: “Custom”, “Full”, “Both”, “Alternative “.

If you select the “Custom” type of backup, in the “Additional objects” column, you will need to check the selected items for saving backup copies of files.

To fully restore the Mozilla Firefox browser profile with all browser settings, you will need to select the “Full” backup type. In the “Additional objects” column, you need to check the boxes next to all the items, then click on the “Select all” button.

In the next tab “Where to Backup (Where to save the backup)” you need to select “Destination directory” – the place where the backup created by the extension will be located. To do this, it is better to create a folder in advance in the place on your hard drive where it is more convenient for you to store browser backups. Then you will need to select a folder to save the backups.

If the hard disk is divided into several local disks, then it is better to store backups not on the “C” drive, but on another disk. Because in case of sudden problems with the operating system and the impossibility of restoring it, you will have to reinstall the operating system and in this case all backups will be lost. If the backups are located on a different drive, then reinstalling the operating system will not affect them.

You can also check the box “Include time and date in folder name” so that the name of the folder can be used to determine the time when a particular backup was created. If necessary, you can change the Maximum number of backups in the destination directory.

In the next tab “When to Backup” in the “Scheduler”, you can select the desired period and time for automatic backups. You can also create a backup when you start or close your browser. Backups can also be created manually.

The next two tabs contain add-on settings. You can change nothing in these tabs.

In the “Box.net” tab, you can “Enable upload to box.net” of the created backups. To do this, you first need to register in this cloud storage so that you can upload the created backups to the Box.net storage.

To create a full backup, you need to click on the button “Firefox” => “Backup Utilities …” => “FEBE” => “Create backup”.

The FEBE extension starts creating a backup copy and notifies you of the completion of its creation with a sound signal. The beep can be turned off in the add-on’s settings if it annoys you. A new browser window opens, where you can see the result of the work of this add-on to create a backup.

How to restore Firefox settings

To restore a full backup, you need to click on the “Firefox” => “Backup Utilities…” => “FEBE” => “Restore Profile” button. The Restore Profile window will show the current browser profile. In a newly installed browser, the profile will have the name “default”, and in a long-running browser, it may have something like this – “wlsx1lfw.default”.

In the image, the profile name is “1234” because that’s what I named the new profile when I restored the profile, after deleting the browser and then reinstalling the browser. With a running browser, the FEBE add-on will not be able to restore an existing active profile, as some files will be blocked.

You will need to create another profile for the Mozilla Firefox browser profile recovery process. To do this, click on the “Create new profile” button.

In the field “Enter new profile name (Enter the name of the new profile)” I entered the name of the profile – “new profile”. Next, you need to click on the “Create” button.

A new profile has appeared in the profiles field – “new profile”. Then you need to click on the “Select local backup to restore” button, and then in the Explorer window select the folder with the backup.

The name of the backup folder will contain the date the backup was created. After opening the selected folder, you need to select the file with the “.fbu” ​​extension, and then click on the “Open” button.

In the “Restore profile” window, you need to click on the “Start profile restore” button.

In the message that appears, you need to click on the “OK” button to start the restoration of the browser profile.

After that, the restoration of the Mozilla Firefox browser profile begins. After the profile recovery is completed, the FEBE extension will inform you about it. In the “Restore Profile” window, you will need to click on the “Firefox start options” button.

Next, you need to select from the options offered by the extension in “Firefox start options (Firefox launch settings)”, the settings for launching the Mozilla Firefox browser.

• “Use newly restored or currently selected profile (Use the recently restored or selected profile)” – in this case, the browser will be launched from the restored or currently selected profile.
• “Use profile manager (Use profile manager)” – in this case, the profile manager window will open, and you select which profile to launch the browser in.
• “Start Firefox the way it did before (Launching Firefox with the previous profile)” – the browser will start with the currently active profile that exists now, before restoring.

After selecting the launch settings for the Mazila Firefox browser, you need to click on the “OK” button.

Article Conclusions

When using the FEBE extension, you can save the browser profile by creating a backup copy so that you can always quickly restore the Mozilla Firefox browser profile.

Watch a video about using the FEBE add-on. In this video, I made a full backup of my profile, then uninstalled the Mozilla Firefox browser from my computer, then reinstalled it and restored my profile using the FEBE extension. As a result, the newly installed Firefox browser began to work with all my previous settings.