It is a good idea to backup your Firefox profiles regularly to have options at hand when a profile needs to be restored. This can be the case after a hard drive crash, file corruption or update that caused problems.
It is also useful if you want to migrate to another system and take your customizations, extensions and all that good stuff with you.
We have reviewed several backup options before, from the Firefox extenion FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) to the third party application MozBackup.
And now another backup solution? Firefox Batckup (no that is not a misspelling) is a small batch script that can backup all Firefox profiles with minimal effort. It is not as versatile as Febe or MozBackup but on the other hand less complicated to use.
All you basically need to do is to execute the script on your computer system, select a destination directory and press enter. You can keep the default backup destination if you like, which would mean that you only have to press enter to backup all Firefox profiles. The default backup directory is set to the Windows desktop.
Batckup Firefox has two advantages over the two other backup solutions. First its uncomplicated use and second the ability to backup all Firefox profiles in one go without extra configuration.
The downside of the batch file is the restoration. The only way to restore a profile is to copy its contents from the backup location to the Firefox profile folder. That’s handled better by the two backup alternatives.
A second batch file to restore a profile to the default Firefox profile folder would be very handy. The batch file displays the default Firefox profile location after the backup. It is still up to the user to remember that location.
Another benefit of a batch file is the ability to create scheduled tasks easily. This way you could run the backup regularly, for instance once a day before shutdown or once a week, to automate the backups.
Batch backup for Firefox is available at the developer website. If you are a Thunderbird user, you find a similar batch file to backup the profile’s of the email client as well on the developer website.