Moving Firefox across drives
Hi,
Sorry if this is a stupid question - I just can't find anything online that works. I'm trying to move the entirety of Firefox from my C:\ drive to my D:\ drive in order to reduce writes to my SSD. I'm trying to use mklink with this command to move my profiles from appdata:
mklink /J "C:\Users\[name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles" "D:\Programs\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles"
However, when I try and execute it I get the result "Cannot create a file when that file already exists." Does anyone know how to fix this?
All Replies (5)
If anyone has a better way of doing this other than using mklink, i'd appreciate that too :)
Are you talking about moving just the profile, just the program, or both?
What's your computer system and Firefox version?
FredMcD said
Are you talking about moving just the profile, just the program, or both? What's your computer system and Firefox version?
Hi Fred, thanks for the reply I only want to move the profiles and cache data from my app data folders. I've already moved the program across through reinstalling it :)
I'm using Windows 10 x64 and my Firefox version is 79.0 (64-bit)
On the other hard drive, create a folder where you want to store the profile.
Type about:profiles<enter> in the address bar. Select Create New Profile.
Select the folder you just created including the drive information. ex: "D:\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<==profile name==>"
After, make sure the new profile works properly.
Hi best is to create a new profile on that D-drive and copy specific files from the old profile to the new profile. You can create a new folder on beforehand on the D-drive to be used for this profile and use "Choose Folder" in the dialog to create a new profile and point to this folder.
You can copy specific files with Firefox closed to the current profile folder to recover/transfer specific personal data.
- bookmarks and history: places.sqlite
- favicons: favicons.sqlite
- bookmark backups: compressed .jsonlz4 JSON backups in the bookmarkbackups folder
- cookies.sqlite for the Cookies
- formhistory.sqlite for saved autocomplete Form Data
- logins.json (passwords) and key4.db (58+) or key3.db (57 and older) (decryption key) for Passwords saved in the Password Manager
if you only have key3.db then make sure to remove an existing key4.db - cert9.db (58+) or cert8.db (57 and older) for (intermediate) certificates stored in the Certificate Manager
if you only have cert8.db then make sure to remove an existing cert9.db - persdict.dat for words you added to the spelling checker dictionary
- permissions.sqlite for Permissions and possibly content-prefs.sqlite for other website specific data (Site Preferences)
- sessionstore.jsonlz4 for open tabs and pinned tabs (see also the sessionstore-backups folder)
You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.
- Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Folder/Directory:
Windows: Open Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data