Restoring All Firefox WIndows 10
I installed a plug in and have now lost all my Firefox configuration, stored pages etc. I backup my entire PC everyday and can restore individual files. What Windows 10 files need to be restored in order to return my Firefox before the crash?
thank you, Robert
चुने गए समाधान
Your Firefox data files are stored along a hidden path, so the first step is to set Windows to show hidden files and folders:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files-0320fe58-0117-fd59-6851-9b7f9840fdb2
On disk, your Firefox data is stored under:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox
That folder contains a couple of index files (installs.ini, profiles.ini) and the Profiles folder.
Can you find those in your backup? If so, I suggest:
(1) right-click > Rename the Firefox folder to FirefoxOLD
(2) copy/paste/restore the Firefox folder (with all of its contents) from your backup to the Mozilla folder (after the restore, Firefox and FirefoxOLD should appear side-by-side in the Mozilla folder)
Important: make sure you restore the folder under Roaming and not Local.
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Hi. It was a plugin to allow me to view video from a network video recorder. Installing it caused me to lose firefox and all my configuration and bookmarks.
I do a full image backup of my PC every day to a network attached storage. I can restore any individual files or restore an entire drive. I dont know what a Windows restore to last image is but willing to try if it will recover Firefox.
So my thought was I could restore just the Firefox files from yesterday's backup rather then the entire C drive. But I dont know what files to restore.
what files would I select to restore Firefox?
चयनित समाधान
Your Firefox data files are stored along a hidden path, so the first step is to set Windows to show hidden files and folders:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files-0320fe58-0117-fd59-6851-9b7f9840fdb2
On disk, your Firefox data is stored under:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox
That folder contains a couple of index files (installs.ini, profiles.ini) and the Profiles folder.
Can you find those in your backup? If so, I suggest:
(1) right-click > Rename the Firefox folder to FirefoxOLD
(2) copy/paste/restore the Firefox folder (with all of its contents) from your backup to the Mozilla folder (after the restore, Firefox and FirefoxOLD should appear side-by-side in the Mozilla folder)
Important: make sure you restore the folder under Roaming and not Local.
jscher2000 . Thank you so much! Your solution and steps were precise and solved my issue perfectly. I was able to find the Firefox folder in the Acronis Backup and restore it and everything is good now.
Your knowledge is impressive and you were generous with your time to patiently step through the solution.
I need to be more rigorous in backing up Firefox config and bookmarks. Is there a way to automate that backup?
Thank you again and especially for being so quick with a solution.
Thank you for reporting back.
There is an article on making profile backups, but if you have an automated process already, I don't know whether this will be any simpler:
There also is a lesser known method to set up a daily (or maybe it's every time you restart Firefox?) bookmark export. There is an article about it on another site:
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML
- To set a path to Documents or Downloads, etc. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.bookmarks.file
If you set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML = true then Firefox will create an HTML bookmarks backup when Firefox is closed. This is different from a JSON backup that is created when you start Firefox (this is to speedup closing Firefox).
You can make Firefox create an automatic HTML backup (bookmarks.html) in the Firefox profile folder when Firefox is closed by setting browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true on the about:config page.
The HTML backup is created by default in the profile folder as bookmarks.html every time you close Firefox, but you can set the path and file name via the browser.bookmarks.file pref on the about:config page. The browser.bookmarks.file pref doesn't exist by default and you need to create a new String pref with the name browser.bookmarks.file and set the value to the full path of the backup bookmarks.html file including the file name.