Continuous profile backup
I currently back up most of the files on my computer with a program that watches files and uploads them to cloud whenever they change. I'm wondering if this would be an effective way to back up my Firefox profiles, given that I usually have Firefox open.
I've noticed the article on (manually) backing up profiles says to close Firefox prior to copying the profile folder. Is that just to prevent users from getting tripped up by the lock file? Or is there another reason for it?
All Replies (2)
I use a cloud backup program to do a daily backup (rather than continuous upload). Having Firefox open while the backup runs is no problem as long as I exclude the "parent.lock" file from the backup set. (I also exclude the cache folders, but that's to save on bandwidth and storage: including them wouldn't cause a problem per se.)
Bear in mind that Firefox writes to some files very frequently (such as places.sqlite), so your backup program will be doing quite a lot of uploading if you try to mirror every change to every file.
Another reason is that Firefox keeps some data in memory during a session and only write to the profile folder when you close Firefox or make specific changes.