I-Firefox Community Forum

Roughly every 2 weeks I backup important files to a external hard drive.

One of the things I always backup is my Firefox profile. I have been doing this for years without any problems.

I 7zip my profile and copy it to the hard drive.

I tried to do this yesterday (July 25 2025), and was getting access denied messages for files in the profile. So I tried to simply copy the profile. Same thing access denied.

I cleared the history, used wise disk cleaner, rebooted my machine and tried again. Same thing access denied when trying to backup or copy the profile.

I am assuming that this is happening since 141 because I updated Firefox since the last time I backed up my profile, and never had a problem previously.

Could anyone have an idea what the problem is? Thank you for your time.

I have Firefox installed on a Windows 11 desktop. The profile is missing, yet Firefox is working fine, and I see all of my bookmarks, etc.

I have windows set to show hidden files.

When I try to run %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ it tells me that the location is unavailable.

I cannot find the profile anywhere in file explorer, despite multiple tries to search for it.

If I go to Help > Troubleshooting Information, I see a "Location is not available" message, shown in the attached image.

I could uninstall and reinstall Firefox, but I'd prefer to solve this because the exact same thing is happening to my Thunderbird profile. It doesn't exist anywhere, yet I can see all of my emails and it appears to be working properly. I only found this problem because I wanted to backup my emails but was unable to.

Both of these profiles must exist somewhere, but I've tried everything to find them. Please help me fix this in Firefox, and then if I have a fix here I'll try to apply it to Thunderbird, where I have a lot of emails I'd hate to lose.

Hello, I want to travel my profile manually. And may automate it by my home computer which is a WebDAV server.

But I find a big folder "Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\fgrfgcgt.default-release\storage\default" It is 2.65G which is a bit big. I can exclude/delete it from my backup?