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is it possible to change the location of the FF profile folder?

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by PeteSuchon

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My hard drive recently failed and I lost all my Firefox profile information because I had never backed it up. As a precaution I would like to move my profile folder from "C:/ ...Profiles" to my Dropbox synch folder which would automagically back up my profile to the cloud. TIA -Pete-

My hard drive recently failed and I lost all my Firefox profile information because I had never backed it up. As a precaution I would like to move my profile folder from "C:/ ...Profiles" to my Dropbox synch folder which would automagically back up my profile to the cloud. TIA -Pete-

Chosen solution

You can create a new empty folder in the location that you want to use for this profile. You can use the Profile Manager to create a new profile and use the "Choose Folder" button to browse to the location on the profile you just created.

Note that you should never use "Choose Folder" to specify a folder that already contains files that do not belong to Firefox (i.e. only use "Choose Folder" if you know what you are doing, either to recover a lost profile that isn't listed or to create a new profile using an empty folder you previously created).

See also:

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You can choose the install location with the manual installer from here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0.2/win64/en-US/

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Thanks for the quick reply but unless I missed something all this does is allow me to change the default INSTALL directory. I want to change the location of the PROFILE folder. Since it is stored under the common APPDATA directory I was hoping it would be possible to direct where FFox looks for the profile. TIA -Pete-

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Chosen Solution

You can create a new empty folder in the location that you want to use for this profile. You can use the Profile Manager to create a new profile and use the "Choose Folder" button to browse to the location on the profile you just created.

Note that you should never use "Choose Folder" to specify a folder that already contains files that do not belong to Firefox (i.e. only use "Choose Folder" if you know what you are doing, either to recover a lost profile that isn't listed or to create a new profile using an empty folder you previously created).

See also:

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Hello cor-el, That worked like a charm! Thank you so much for the solution to my problem and for introducing me to kb.mozillazine.org lots of good information there.

Thanks again. -Pete-