Mozilla Firefox is the most used web browser today with all the added functionalities, extension and bookmarklets life with Firefox is easy and simple. What if your system crashes and you need to reinstall Firefox? All your days of work will be lost, you have to again search for the extensions, reorganize the bookmarklets and many other things that you have saved on Firefox. In order to avoid all these the best idea is to backup your Firefox profile which is easy and completes in few steps. The process to backup your Firefox profile is:

By default Firefox creates a profile folder where it stores all the information about your extensions, bookmarklets, toolbars and other in the profile. Close the Firefox first on your computer before you continue with the backup process.  To locate the profile folder on your computer

• Windows Vista users

1. Click on the Start button and copy and paste this %APPDATA%MozillaFirefoxProfiles in the search box that is located at the bottom of the Start menu and press enter.
2. In the Windows Explorer you can see the profile folder (e.g. xxxx.default)
3. Copy the folder and paste it on to the pen drive or other media to use it as a backup.

• Windows 98/2000 and XP users

1. Click on the Start button and click on the Run icon to open the dialog box in that enter or copy paste %APPDATA%MozillaFirefoxProfiles and hit enter.
2. In the Windows Explorer you can see the profile folder (e.g. xxxx.default)
3. Copy the folder and paste it on to the pen drive or other media to use it as a backup.

If you have multiple profiles in the Firefox then select the profile that you want to backup and copy paste it on a media to use it as a backup.

• To restore a profile backup in the Firefox, you can complete this with few simple steps.

1. Like said in the above steps first locate the profile folder on the computer and open it
2. Now copy the entire contents of the backup profile folder that you have saved on a pen drive or other media.
3. Now paste the contents in the existing profile folder, overwrite the existing files if necessary to complete the backup process.
4. You can also replace the existing profile folder with the backed up profile folder but make sure that both the folders are of the same name.

Alternatively for the advanced users you can store the backup folder in different location.

1. Locate the backup profile folder on the pen drive or any other media that you have stored it on. Copy the backup folder and paste it on to the hard drive of the computer.
2. Now open the profiles.ini file in a text editor the location of the file is

• C:Users<username>AppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfiles.ini for Windows Vista
• C:Documents and Settings<username>Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles.ini For Windows 2000/XP users.

Make sure that you select show all files and folders under the folder options in the Tools menu in order to locate the file.

3.  Now replace the 1 with 0 in the line IsRelative=1

4.  Now edit the path of the backup folder after the Path= for example
Path= c:Users<username>AppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfiles<backup
profile folder.default>

5.  Start Firefox you can see that your old profile is active such that you can use Firefox and
all the Add-ons, bookmarklets, saved passwords and other things just like you used to.

There are other applications that help you to backup and restore the Firefox profiles. They are bit tricky to use but by with the built-in wizard you can easily backup profiles by following on screen instructions.

MozBackup: This utility allows you to backup your Firefox profile using the wizard feature and you can also easily restore your profile in Firefox using this tool. It is simple to use and works only of PC.

Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE): This tools is for the professional Firefox users like the web developers. This tools offers more advanced features to backup and restore Firefox profiles. It creates a single .xpi file such that you can restore Firefox on any computer using this software. It runs on both windows and MAC computers but it is bit confusing and hard to use because of all the sub menus and settings.