[SOLVED] Back-up Firefox add-ons and bookmarks to an external drive

grumpyskeptic · 02-20-2021, 12:56 PM

I have Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa Cinnamon, and Firefox 78.7.

I would like to backup the addons and bookmarks to an external drive. I see that there is a .mozilla/Firefox folder in what my file manager calls the Home directory.

In this folder are two sub-folders, one called ...default and the other ....default-esr. Their contents are different.

1) Would it be sufficient to just make a copy of these two folders?

2) They both contain a lot of sub folders and together are about 200MB in size. Do I need everything or are there only some particular folders I need so that I can have a smaller back-up?

Thanks.

shruggy · 02-20-2021, 01:21 PM

Mozilla KB recommends to backup the complete profile, i.e. everything under xxxxxxxx.default: Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

But they also explain how to copy only the most important data: Recovering important data from an old profile.

timl · 02-20-2021, 04:03 PM

I selectively backup my home directory. This include all config files

I try to use my main SSD for system related stuff and any long term storage can live on another drive. So backing up /home/tim is not a huge ask

grumpyskeptic · 02-21-2021, 09:16 AM

Thanks.

I now realise I can use the built-in bookmarks exporter to save them as a small .json file.

The only other thing I want to do is to make a list of all the add-ons. I have tried highlighting the whole add-ons page to copy the text, but that does not work.

Is there any other way to obtain a list of the add-ons? There are more than I would want to write-down manually.

shruggy · 02-21-2021, 10:11 AM

If you go to the address about:support, you'll see two buttons there: Copy raw data to clipboard and Copy text to clipboard. Both would copy much more than only the list of installed extensions. But the raw data are JSON, you can trivially extract extensions e.g. with jq .extensions.

eternallygeek · 02-23-2021, 04:00 PM

If you would rather have an HTML format output of your bookmarks instead of the JSON, in the about:config settings set this, browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true. I do this and then have a nightly batch script that uploads that html file to my website so that I can have my bookmarks anywhere I have internet access.