Feel Firefox - blog, extensions, themes and more

Save Mozilla profiles with MozBackup

November 3rd, 2007

As great as it is to have tools like Firefox and Thunderbird, backing them up can be a tedious process. MozBackup is a tiny program that makes saving and restoring all your bookmarks, extensions, and other personal settings a streamlined and stress-free experience.

The program, which has been translated into dozens of languages, works with Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Netscape on Windows platforms. It doesn’t support Macs or Linux, yet, and it doesn’t work with Sunbird, Firefox Portable, Songbird, or Flock. But for standard Windows iterations of the programs in the Mozilla suite, it’s almost silly to not use this program.

To backup a program, it must be closed. Run the program and it walks you through the procedure. The step-by-step breakdown is painless: choose backup or restore, then the application. Select the program profile and the location to save the backup, and whether you want to password protect the soon-to-be-created file. Lastly, choose which parts of the profile you want to save or restore, from emails and address books to extensions and history, from certificates, cookies, passwords to bookmarks and your cache.

To backup Netscape, choose the Mozilla Suite option and you should be good to go.

Restoring a profile works the same way, but what makes the app extremely useful is that it doesn’t differentiate from a restore and a clean install. So if you’ve got a specific and complicated set of extensions and settings on your work machine, and even merely thinking about how to transfer them to your home computer is enough to make you want to revert to using an Underwood, MozBackup should quell your fears.

The next major release promises a scheduler for automatic backups, support for both Sunbird and Flock, and a log to keep track of backups performed, which would make this program a must-have.

Via Download.com