Trying to bring Pale Moon profile to Firefox with MozBackup
Hi all. I've been using Pale Moon for a good while and I'm thinking about coming back to Firefox. I have the latest version of Firefox installed, and I'm trying to bring my Pale Moon profile over to Firefox. Or at least my history.
MozBackup saves and restores PM profiles just the same as it does FF profiles, as .pcv files. I've tried many times to "restore" a new FF profile from a saved PM .pcv backup. I get an error saying that the selected backup isn't for the selected application -- please see my screen shot. That's true, but if MozBackup treats the two browsers them same and saves both as .pcv, I'd think I'd be able to move my profiles interchangeably?
The most important thing to me is my History in my PM profile. I've done the import/export bookmarks from PM to FF, but that's only bookmarks, not history. And copy/paste the PM profile folder into my Firefox profile folder of course doesn't work.
Is there a tweak to MozBackup that I can do to make this work, that is, "restoring" my PM profile to my FF profile, or is there another way that I can bring my history, if nothing else, from PM to FF?
Thank you so much --
SBS
Chosen solution
I sure as hell wouldn't use a PaleMoon Profile (complete) in Firefox 43.0, they are too different from each other these days and may cause issues that may be hard to fix. IMO, you would be better doing a cor-el recommended, copying your places.sqlite file into Firefox, and hope it is compatible with Firefox 43.0 or that Firefox is able to "correct"/fix the differences between PaleMoon and Firefox 43.0.
First thing you need to do is to open your PaleMoon Profile" Help > Troubleshooting Information -> Application Basics --> Profile ---> Show Folder and copy the places.sqilte file from there.
Then use that same "Help > " path in Firefox 43.0; then close Firefox while leaving the Windows Explorer folder opened to your Profile open. After enough time for Firefox to completely close (give it a minute or so), Paste and replace the places.sqlite file from PaleMoon into the Firefox Profile folder.
Then open Firefox [with your fingers crossed] and hope that the places.sqlite file from PaleMoon works in Firefox.
Edit: I have the current version of PaleMoon installed, along with multiple different versions of Firefox installed and I see many differences between the file 'makeup' of Firefox vs, PaleMoon. Up until Firefox 34, or so, I wouldn't have felt there might be a problem copying an entire Profile over, but Firefox has been changed a lot more that PaleMoon, and I don't feel the "compatibilty" is the same as it once was. IMO, PaleMoon has moved well beyond just being a "clone" of Firefox "under-the-hood". Currently it is another Gecko-based browser, that at most is similar to current-day Firefox; but it is its own browser.
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You would need the places.sqlite database to get bookmarks and history.
Thank you so much. But the only place on my computer that I see places.sqlite is in Thunderbird. In Pale Moon and Firefox I only have index.sqlite. Is there any other way to find it?
you can rename the .pcv file to .zip (since it's actually just a compressed zip file) and see if places.sqlite is present in there.
Chosen Solution
I sure as hell wouldn't use a PaleMoon Profile (complete) in Firefox 43.0, they are too different from each other these days and may cause issues that may be hard to fix. IMO, you would be better doing a cor-el recommended, copying your places.sqlite file into Firefox, and hope it is compatible with Firefox 43.0 or that Firefox is able to "correct"/fix the differences between PaleMoon and Firefox 43.0.
First thing you need to do is to open your PaleMoon Profile" Help > Troubleshooting Information -> Application Basics --> Profile ---> Show Folder and copy the places.sqilte file from there.
Then use that same "Help > " path in Firefox 43.0; then close Firefox while leaving the Windows Explorer folder opened to your Profile open. After enough time for Firefox to completely close (give it a minute or so), Paste and replace the places.sqlite file from PaleMoon into the Firefox Profile folder.
Then open Firefox [with your fingers crossed] and hope that the places.sqlite file from PaleMoon works in Firefox.
Edit: I have the current version of PaleMoon installed, along with multiple different versions of Firefox installed and I see many differences between the file 'makeup' of Firefox vs, PaleMoon. Up until Firefox 34, or so, I wouldn't have felt there might be a problem copying an entire Profile over, but Firefox has been changed a lot more that PaleMoon, and I don't feel the "compatibilty" is the same as it once was. IMO, PaleMoon has moved well beyond just being a "clone" of Firefox "under-the-hood". Currently it is another Gecko-based browser, that at most is similar to current-day Firefox; but it is its own browser.
Modified by the-edmeister
philipp said
you can rename the .pcv file to .zip (since it's actually just a compressed zip file) and see if places.sqlite is present in there.
Thank you! That sounds like a good idea for making an extra backup copy of my history. Greatly appreciated.
@the_edmeister --
Thanks for so much great info and for so much time.
I followed your instructions precisely, and unfortunately Firefox couldn't "fix" the PM sqlite. It shows up in my FF Windows Explorer folder as places.sqlite.corrupt now. So I just let CCleaner do away with it.
I have a lot of time to tinker, and maybe I'll hit on something. Maybe installing an older version of FF, before 34-ish, and then trying to replace that version's sqlite with the one from PM? Using MozBackup to safeguard my current, correctly-functioning FF profile, of course. And *if* that worked, updating FF to the current version in short order for security's sake.
I'm having issues with PM hanging or not responding (I imagine due to a PICNIC issue, to be honest) and I'd like to come back to FF and see how that goes, but it'd be very hard for me to sacrifice my history.
Thank you again, very much, for your time and info.
Honestly, I wouldn't let CCleaner anywhere near a Firefox Profile, too many bad results posted here over the years about CCleaner destroying Firefox.
Just right-click that file in Windows Explorer and use Delete.
@the-edmeister --
There definitely is a lot of stuff in the "plus pack" (no idea what it's actually called) that I integrated into CCleaner that looks dangerous to Firefox. Thank you for the reminder.
Now for the big story -- my experiment worked! I did a deep uninstall of the latest FF version with Revo, downloaded and installed v. 29, did the steps that you outlined above, and FF detected the PM sqlite just fine! All of my PM history is here. I guess the real test will be to see if updating to the latest version of FF keeps said sqlite recognizable, but here's hoping for the best. It seems like it "should," but that always leaves a lot of room for "might not." If you hadn't mentioned how different the two browsers are since about FF v. 34, I probably wouldn't have thought to try this. Thanks so much for that!
Thank you again, everybody, very much.