attempts to move profiles from xp to win 7 don't work
I am trying to get Firefox and Thunderbird to work on a windows 7 machine. Everything worked fine in XP. So I have a new win7 computer. I copied the profile contents from the xp machine to the win7 machine. While Firefox and Thunderbird work as advertised, I don't have any bookmarks or address book or saved message files. This has probably been addressed before, so if you have a link to the correct solution, I'd appreciate it.
Any ideas out there?
Cheers!
Paul
Krejt Përgjigjet (6)
Have you seen this post? Seems like Syncing might be able to help you transfer things properly.
Otherwise, these two articles may also provide more information on transferring profiles:
Note that Firefox uses two locations for your personal data in the profile folder. One for the main profile folder and one for the caches and some other data like the phishing protection database. So make that you copy the files to the correct location.
You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
It is best to only copy the files that you need and not the full Firefox profile folder, especially when you copy to another computer and a different OS.
XP:
- C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Cache:
- C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Windows Vista and later:
- C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Cache:
- C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
OK, here's my plan. I'm going to uninstall Firefox and re-install a fresh copy. I will then copy a folder called <bookmarkbackups>. It is full of *.json files. I assume that these are the primary bookmark files. Is that correct? I also assume that the other files like cookies, history, etc. will be automatically created in the normal operation of Firefox. I also assume that when Firefox loads, it looks for *.json files.
If that works, I'll also do the same with Thunderbird, just bringing over the address book and the local folder files.
How does that sound?
Cheers!
Paul
You will have to restore a JSON backup manually in the Bookmarks Manager (Library) or delete the places.sqlite file to make Firefox restore the most recent backup in the bookmarkbackups folder.
OK, so then what file is the main bookmarks file and where is it? I didn't see it in the profile folder on the XP machine. All I saw in the profile folder was the bookmarksbackup folder and a small html file.
The bookmarks and the history are stored in the places.sqlite database file.