Backup and restore settings and bookmarks in Firefox

You are going to format your computer but are afraid you would lose all the Mozilla Firefox settings? You can backup Firefox settings and bookmarks and later restore them using the following procedure :

Backing up Firefox settings

  1. Close Firefox window if Firefox is running.
  2. Press key combination Windows Key + R. This would pop up the Run dialog.
  3. Type %AppData%MozillaFirefoxProfiles in the Run dialog and press Enter.

    Backup Firefox Settings

  4. In the folder that opens you would see a folder with .default suffix in its name. The name of the folder is of the format xxxxxxxx.default where x can be any alphabet character or number. In my computer, I have a folder ohct35o0.default. Double-click on this folder to open it.
  5. Copy all the contents of this folder to a backup folder like on a USB stick.

Restoring Firefox settings

  1. Close Firefox window if Firefox is running.
  2. Press key combination Windows Key + R. This would pop up the Run dialog.
  3. Type %AppData%MozillaFirefoxProfiles in the Run dialog and press Enter.
  4. In the folder that opens you would see a folder with .default suffix in its name. The name of the folder is of the format xxxxxxxx.default where x can be any alphabet character or number.
  5. Copy all the contents from the backup folder to this folder. Overwrite the files if asked by Windows.

This method is very useful when re-installing Windows. You can backup Firefox settings including, add-ons, bookmarks, cookies and saved passwords.