For some unknown reason, my Firefox browser died on me this afternoon and I soon realised the utter worthlessness of the Firefox backup system,
FEBE, which I have been using the past few weeks. FEBE is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter crap. It doesn't restore a God-damn thing. Thank God I had the insight to copy my Firefox profile to another hard-drive folder before uninstalling and re-installing. Otherwise I would have gone totally insane and committed cold-blooded slaughter.
Today's experience has made me realise that you don't need fancy back-up systems for your Firefox browser. All you need to do is make sure that you copy your Firefox profile to a separate location on a regular basis. Your profile has everything that your browser does - all the settings, extensions, search boxes, toolbars and so on. You can easily find your profile by going to "Documents and Settings" then your Windows username, then "Mozilla", then "Firefox", then "profiles". Keep a copy on a re-writable CD and update it perhaps once a week.
Now if Firefox goes belly-up and you're forced to re-install, you will of course have a basic bare-bones browser. So you have to fit your profile back in to make everything appear again as before. Here's how you do it. Please note that when you re-install Firefox, a new profile is automatically made for you. Don't delete this profile just yet as it royally screws things up big time. I'm speaking from bitter experience here.
First, move the old Firefox profile back into the Mozilla Firefox "profiles" folder. Keep a copy still in another location (as back-up insurance) and make sure you know what the profile is called so you can recognise it later.
Go to your start menu then "run". When the command line box comes up, type
firefox -P . This brings up Firefox's Profile Manager.
Your old profile should now come up in the list along with the new one that was made for you when you re-installed Firefox. Click on the old profile and click "Start Firefox". Make sure the "don't ask at startup" box is ticked.
Firefox should now open with your old profile and settings. Click around and if you're convinced everything is OK, you can now go ahead and delete the other profile from your profiles folder.
You may find that for a while, some of your extensions won't work. For several hours, my Greasemonkey scripts didn't work and neither did my SnagIt tools. But finally they started working again.
