raptor, thanks so much for this. makes life a great deal easier.
are you the same guy who does autopatcher? if so i owe you doubly!

how easy might it be (once current stuff has been ironed out of course) to add sunbird support? pushing our luck i know...

cheers
roger

I was very happy to find this tool. If one thought there wouldn't appear any program better than MozBackup, well this is probably it... It actually backed up even my extensions, and when restoring them it worked just fine.

I just have a suggestion... Once defined a directory to make the backups, in the next operations of backing up or restoring it would be just perfect to have it memorized. Otherwise you will always have to browse for the directory.

Another handy tool would be a template for the filename... But this is not as important as the defined directory function...

anyway, this is just little things compared to what the program already does.

thanks for your work

ugoveri (ugoveri@netcabo.pt)

I like this tool and also use to use MozBackup, but I now use Karen's Replicator. I have my Firefox & Thunderbird profiles set to automatically backup every night. If BackupFox had a scheduling feature, I'd probably use it again. I'd forget to do it otherwise. Feature request? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink?

That's looks like a great tool for automated backing up, but how do you restore the profiles? The bookmarks, cache and other data would be ok to copy into another profile, but you can't just copy the extensions into another profile.

I have used this great utility BACKUPFOX073 for the following:

Win XP Home
Win 2000 Pro

I have used it with FF 1.0.3 and TB 1.0.2

I am pretty sure that it will work with the new FF 1.0.4 as well. I did a backup of the 1.0.4 profile excluding cache but did not restore it yet.

Anyone else get this ti work with FF 1.0.4?

Still cannot fugure out why some people still cannot get this app to work when they double click on it.

I don't extract it to a folder but just leave it zipped up and run from the archive.

When will there be a new version Raptor!

Thanks for a great product and for FREE!!

Precisely. Many of the problems voiced here can be attributed to the chrome.rdf file.

The issue here lies in trying to restore a profile that contains extensions.

In a nutshell, if the if the path to chrome.rdf has changed in any way & you try to restore a backup profile that contains extensions, that profile won't be recognized.

For instance, when you install Firefox, the default profile is placed inside a security folder named with random characters. If you reinstalled Firefox on another computer (or uninstalled Firefox & reinstalled it on the same computer for that matter), a newly named security folder would generated to house the profile folder.

Chrome.rdf must be modified to reflect this path change.

To clear up any confusion & get a complete understanding of backing up and restoring a profile, see

the-edmeister's Firefox Profiles Index page
http://the-edmeister.home.comcast.net/html/advice.html

I realised that many people have the problem that once you launch the program it does not run. I have the same issue too. Tried double clicking on it in explorer, tried running from command line and even tried regsvr32 to register the ocx control but still the same. And when i try 0.7 or 0.6 then i get the 50003 error message. Any idea what is wrong? I've not seen any replies to the problem or am i missing something? The log file has 2 lines as follows:

Backupfox starting...
XP-style loaded.

I am running on windows 2000 server with SP4 and latest hotfixes, firefox 1.0.3.

I probably won't have a personal use for Backupfox because I do my profile backups & restoration manually, but I wanted to try it out so I could refer it to others.

Unfortunately, I have the same problems getting it to work.

It appears that nothing happens when double clicking v0.73, but Task Manager does show it as a running process in the background. Still can't access it, but maybe this will help in pointing out what the problem is.

Thought it might be related to the fact I use win98se, but it looks like the problems are not isolated to my OS.

Also wanted to respond to a couple other things mentioned here.

1. It is irrelevant which Firefox version you are using. A profile is a profile.

The one deal breaker is that it's crucial you insure all the extensions in the profile are compatible with the Firefox version, i.e, if you are upgrading fron FX1.0.3 to FX 1.0.4, make sure your old extensions are friendly to 1.0.4.

2. It's easy enough to backup your complete profile, as well as restoring all it's settings & components, with or without extensions included.

If you want to backup a complete profile, you can use Backupfox or just copy & paste the complete profile to a backup area, preferably to some sort of backup media apart from your master harddrive (cd, second harddrive, etc).

The fact is, this should be just one element of a backup strategy for all your important data.

Someone here mentiond Karen's replicator. There are many similar free programs out there that perform such tasks.

If you don't implement such a plan, your playing russian roulette.

Eventually you will inevitably pay the price in the form of unrecoverable loss. It can happen in a split second, & you will be left cursing yourself for doing nothing about it beforehand.

Both Bookmark Backup & Mozbackup do the job just fine for Firefox. The only difference is that Bookmark Backup does it automatically, & Mozbackup does it manually.

Bookmark Backup extension
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/

Mozbackup
http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

3. Save your extensions installation files (.xpi files) locally, & back them up as well. Any extension can can be installed by simply dragging & dropping it's given .xpi file into the open browser, Very handy.

4. Firefox allows you to put your cache (as well as your profile) anywhere you want.

Get the popular & useful chromedit extension
http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/

Use it to add the following enrty to your user.js. Just change the "F:\Firefox Cache" to wherever you want your cache located.

user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory", F:\Firefox Cache);

My main Firefox folder is H:\Firefox. My profile resides in that folder & I locate my cache at "F:\Firefox Cache", so when I backup my profile folder, the cache is not included.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050512 Firefox/1.0.4 (stipe s8v2)

Hi!

I just tried the tool to transfer my Thunderbird profile from my Laptop to my desktop. It did not work. I could start Thunderbird after the resore but did not get any display (neither the folders/messages nor button etc, only the frame).

Could this because my Laptop has an English Windows installed and my Desktop is in german? If yes, is it possible to support such a config in a future release?

Thanks a lot!

Michael

fantastic bit of software been using it for a while now

Hi everyone.... Was wondering if there is a solution to this problem that i had posted above. I am sure a lot of other peoples are having the same issues and trying to look for the solution too. Any tips guys on getting backupfox to work. Thanks a ton in advance.

i think youre right about that one.. and hey im from montreal too!

i still have not figured out why it works for some but not others.

I am also still trying to get it work without any luck. The problem is still there. Is the source code for this program available somewhere, so that i can help debug and figure out what is wrong?

Nice program!, Been looking for somthing like this.

Thx's Raptor.

I'll give this a try.

I can't make it work on my PC. and I know this is because I saved my profiles in other place than C:\document and settings\...

but is it really only because the line " IsRelative = 1" in profile.ini ?

in my case the value is 0 since I saved it in other place. how can I make it 1 without mving my prifile?

thanks.

or any plan to be able to backup profiles in anyplace in next version?

Hello to everyone im new here....
first of all thanks a lot to nw_raptor for this awesome program. but i have a couple question.
1- when I extract the backupfox.zip shows up 3 files. backupfox.exe, 7za.exe, COMDLG32.OCX. If i back up my profile plus xxxxx.firefox. I wonder that can i restore my back up file just using the backup.exe? Do i need other two files? Cos Id like to attach just backup.exe and xxxxx.firefox to my yahoo mail account then I can use my profile what computer I want. Its gonna be easier to download two files than 4 files. if its possible maybe on next version could be just one file.

2. There is one option on this program like exclude cache. If nw_raptor add the "exclude passwords", "exclude saved forms" would be fantastic. Cos i use so many different computers n I dont like to put all my passwords on another computer.

3. By the way on this why the newest post on the last page. If the last posted on first page and on the top would be perfect.

I hope I dont bitchin so much.
Thanks to everybody. And thanks to nw_raptor for this wonderful program.

nw_raptor,
I just wanted to say thanks for the awesome app and I look forward to its further development. The first of which would be fixing the problem of migrating your profile to another computer where your username is not the same - here's hoping Fx 1.1 will do that for you! I will continue to work around this until then. The second of which is an option for automatic backup. I'm sure this will be a hard feat, though. I usually leave Fx open almost all of the time, so I can see issues there. Another thing to consider if you implement auto backup is to distinguish (naming maybe) the folder it saves to from manual backups somehow. Anyway, thanks again...I love it.


Ned,
Thank you so very much for your post. Now I can migrate my profile back and forth between PC and laptop. Here's the procedure I use;

1. Close Fx and launch backupfox and perform backup to USB drive.
2. Launch backupfox on 2nd computer and restore from USB drive.
3. Go to (C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOURPROFILENAME.default\chrome) and open your chrome.rdf file with Notepad.
4. Open the Edit menu and click on Replace (or just hit Ctrl + H).
5. Type in the two usernames your dealing with ("Find What" is username on the pc your migrating from and "Replace With" is username on current pc).
6. Click "Replace All".
7. Voila! Close the folder and launch Firefox.

Hope this helps a few people out there.

Thanks again, Mike

Edit to step 7;

7. Save and close Notepad, then launch Firefox.

Mike

Works great! I'm saving the file for the next time I have to reformat, but I just tested it and it has everything I want it to.

- WindowsTechie

Worked well for me! I had a look at a few usability issues you might want to look at.

*Installer/Uninstaller! You can get lots of free programs to automate making one for you.
*It kind of looks like a Wizard, but doesn't exactly act like one. Maybe brake it down in to steps to make it easier to understand? For example: Welcome > Backup or Restore? > Select Program > Choose Location > Confirm > In Progress > Complete -Again or Exit?
*Progress Bar while performing backup/restore, or if you can't messure it, an animation to show the program hasn't hung?
*Provide option to create New Folder in the Choose Folder Common Dialog when making a backup, rather than having to type an extra folder on to the end of the path.
*You can exit mid-backup, overwrite a previous backup and do various other actions which could cause loss of data. Question the user doing this and pause the action while a message box is on screen.
*Make sure the complete message stands out. At the moment, its hard to notice the program has finished since the 'working' and 'complete' messages look so alike.

Good luck with future versions! ^_^

hi,

i had to install windows 2000 from scratch on C: .
(same os, same user/password, same directory structure are before)

i have restored a pretty new backup of C: (before reinstalling) on a different drive - containing all my thunderbird mails and adresses.

since my last thunderbird backup with backupfox is older than this C:-backup
i would like to extract (or 'backup') my thunderbird and firefox data from this
restored backup and transfer/restore/copy them to C:, where thunderbird (freshly installed) has no data right now in the default profile.

any advice on how to do this?

- can i use backupfox for this (like making a backup of a thunderbird installation on a drive different from the system drive)?

- do i just have to copy the whole thunderbird-folder containing the profile-dir from the restore-location to C:?

thank you in advance!

It didn't work for me. I tried to restore a profile in full to a clean profile on another computer. All I ended up with was a white-background FireFox and none of the toolbars worked.

No options, no tools, nothing. Couldn't do anything with it. I ended up deleting the profile and creating a new one.

Hi. When I run BackupFox to create a backup file (that is, "save" a profile), it seems to run correctly ("Success! BackupFox has saved the profile named "xxxx" to "xxxx_2005-07-23.firefox"."). But when I look in the folder that I specified, there is no back-up file there. I've tried repeatedly, sometimes trying to place it in different folders, but no files seem to be created. I've run a "find" search on my computer in case it was created in the wrong folder, but no new backup file exists anywhere.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong, or what the problem might be?

(I have BackupFox v0.73.0.13, and am running WinXP. I have used BackupFox successfully on this computer to "restore" a profile which I "saved" from another computer, but now that I am trying to save a profile, it isn't working!)

Any advice or suggestions appreciated. Thanks!

So I tried backupfox when my hard drive began to fail. Got the backup to work for T-bird, which is all I really care about. I have a 133,xxx kb backup file. OK, no sweat...

But when I go to restore it to the new installation of T-Bird, nothing happens -- I get the same inbox I had before. No address book, nothing.

My question: how do I get a readable version of my email (I only have to have onbe email in particular), and a readable version of my address book?

Did you use a new username on the new installation?

Very nice indeed
I will be using this.

Srry to say but this still doesnt work

im using a diff PC FireFox 1.06 and when i dbl click backup fox.exe nothing happens.

What causes this i have no idea. I would really like to give this a shot but it seems there are two types of people.

1: where the app works flawlessly
2: where the app doesn't start at all

THere must be a reason.

why not just install it on a diffrent drive?

i installed it on my D: and after my C: crashed i formatted and re-installed windows and it stilll worked without me installing anything

A nice addition would be the ability to select what is backed up. For example, I use Firefox on two different machines with two distinct sets of bookmarks. I'd like to be able to back up all settings except for bookmarks and keep the two machines in sync (extensions, settings, etc. - just not bookmarks).

Heh well i tried it and i get the white with black unclickable links aswell..

And yah i formatted, so no idea how to get this working, I really need my fav's back

Oh im guessing its because my main hdd has changed Drive letter, i need one with all G:

Theres alot to change in the chrome file.. damn :\

Hello:

I think the idea for BackupFox is great, but I'm having a problem using it to copy my Firefox profile from one PC to another.

I created the backup on my source PC and did the restore on the destination PC. Both the backup and the restore appeared to work correctly. However, post-restore the path ...\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles is empty - no profile directory exists.

Here are a few key files that might help in understanding:

profiles.ini PRE-restore:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/gnsfjroz.default

profiles.ini POST-restore:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=

backupfox.log:

Backupfox starting...
XP-style loaded.
Window size fixed, elements positioned.
Running folder is F:\BackupFox
User Home Path is C:\Documents and Settings\Bill\Application Data
Getting Firefox profiles...
Opening C:\Documents and Settings\Bill\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini
Getting Thunderbird profiles...
Finished! 1 profiles found.
BackupFox loaded successfully!

If I try to run the restore again after the failure (i.e. empty profiles directory), I receive a Run Time Error '76': Path not found, and BackupFox removes all files from the path ...\Application Data\Mozilla except for registry.dat.

Here are a few points/questions:

1. The backup was created to a USB flash drive that was mounted as drive E: on the source PC, but it was mounted as drive F: on destination PC for the restore. Is this a problem? Do the drive letters have to match?
2. Do the profile names have to match between PC's for the restore to work? On my destination PC, the current profile is gnsfjroz.default. I don't recall the name on my source PC, but I'm sure the characters before .default are different.
3. The Windows account names are not the same between, but I realize I can edit chrome.rdf post-restore to address that. This should not have an affect on the problem I am experiencing, should it?

I appreciate and help or advice you can offer.

Lastly, a quick suggestion. I would like it if the current time (down to the second) would be added to the backup file name, allowing for multiple backups per day with unique file names. This would be good if I am making multiple changes to my Firefox profile throughout the day and want to go back to a last known good config.

Thanks again for a great little tool. I'm sure we'll get it working for me.

Best... Bill

nice app... would be nice if I could use it by command line aswell instead of a user interface. any plans for that to happen?

I am guessing the usernames are different on the two computers. This is a known problem with Firefox profiles. Hopefully Mozilla will change this weird behaviour in 1.5



You just gave me a great idea!! Damn, I need find time for all these project (working on 4 already!).

good to hear

Hey thanks alot for this! I found it to be even better than Mozbackup already. I used to have problems restoring extensions with Mozbackup but there's no problem whatsoever with this program. The one feature I'd like to see though if possible is an update feature. I think this would be great since it's a standalone program that can't use firefox's extension updater. I don't know if it's possible for you to do (I'm not much of a software programmer) but in my opinion this would make it the perfect program if it is possible. Thanks again.

I like this program alot, but I need a way to extract atleast my bookmarks from the .firefox file it has created. I cant do it the normal way because of what ever problem I have where it just dosnt put it in the directly when I tell it to restore.

So my question is, how (with out the simple restoration process that dosnt work) would I get my bookmarks out, they are all I need as their importiant.

Thanks, this is a great program overall.

open the .firefox file with winrar or 7-zip or any other archive app that might be able to open it. then extract the bookmark file from it.

Thanks alot, Ill try that *now*...

Thanks alot, I had alot of work on that that is now potentialy saved (when I copy the files across). All I did was rename the .firefox extension to .zip and opened it in Winrar.

Help appreciated

Hi, I've been using this backup fox for last 3weeks, it's been great!
It saved my bookmarks already!

Our computer was infected by Trojan virus, so reinstalled OS today (Windows XP).
Also I downloaded latest version of firefox (1.07) from(1.04).
Before removing the data from harddisk, I saved a whole backupfox073
file including a backup file sized 41.2MB.

So after I reinstalled OS I installed a newest version of firefox.
Then I tried to use backupfox, but it doesn't go.

So I downloaded backupfox073 again from here before and melted a zip file.
I tried to start the program by double clicking backupfox icon
(the one with a picture of fire & harddisk?) just like before,
but nothing happens.
I also tried dragging the
"default_2005-09-28" file onto backupfox icon, this doesn't work either.

Does anyone has any idea of what I am doing wrong?
Any help would be deeply appreciated.
Thanks for reading.

Any chnace of adding a progress bar or '%' completed ??

Great APP

Same problem here unfortunately.

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP4 (UK)
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 (Dutch - with edited language files)

BackupFox 0.6 throws a run-time error (50003), and 0.7.3. just won't open.

Any clues/hints/tips/tricks would be much appreciated.

great work thanks

Any chance we can see a version for Firefox 1.5. Or can someone confirm it works fine with 1.5

BackupFox is such a fantastic application that I've made it a staple in my Windows XP Unattended Install CD...
But now that Firefox 1.5 is out I notice that it doesn't import my profile backups very well anymore.

I don't know if 1.5 has all the features that the author was hoping for in order for the 'final release' of this program to work well (i.e. no single user account dependencies) but right now i'd be happy with being able to import my profile without firefox getting a little wonky.

Sorry everyone for the lack of replies

I study computer science away from Athens, and I got no Internet access whatsoever at my new place... I try to keep up with stuff through the uni's internet... In any case, right now I'm back in Athens for Christmas, so I'm back on my DSL line Hopefully I'll get a DSL line at my new place in January.

I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 recently, but didn't have much time to inspect the profile structure. I'm quite sure they still depend on username, but I'll have to look into the files to see if paths are still stored as absolute paths.

Hi,
I just used this and it seems to work fine ... but... it doesnt import the address book.

Also is there a way to merge files? For example I have an older backup and if I restore that one to my current TB it overwrites everything instead of merging.

Thanks.

I just did a backup from my laptop to home pc, both running WinXP with Firefox 1.5, and I did NOT have to rename anything in the ChromeRDF file...as their isn't one in the chrome folder! When I started up Firefox after the BackupFox restore everything was exactly as it is on my laptop version. So, there should be no more problems with crossing profiles to other computers if you're using Firefox 1.5.

raptor - Thanks again for the great app!

Hi, I want auto-merge firefox profiles from all 4 of my XP PRO partitions, thus! all bookmarks are saved to a fifth data-only partition, and thus! all bookmarks are the same in every partition and worry-free because they is stored in a fifth partition, and extra sweet would be to auto-load this SAVED-MERGED-PROFILE after any reformat and Firefox is reinstalled, (a Krsna-like-perfection)