Update 08-Aug-2015:
>> Kindly do not follow this guide yet. I have since improved the batch file greatly and made it much more flexible. I will update this post in the coming days as soon as I get my hands on a Windows VM. Thank you for your patience!
You can fully backup Firefox and/or Thunderbird either manually by clicking Next, Next, Next in MozBackup, or automatically by using MozBackup along with batch files.
My scenario:
A PC running Windows 7. I have NOT tested this on Windows XP, Vista, 8. But you can try.
I have 1 Firefox profile and 1 Thunderbird profile.
First, download & install MozBackup. Then follow the steps below. If you are not interested in the manual method, just skip to the Steps of Advanced Method at the very bottom.
Steps of Manual Method
STEP 1 – Click “Next”
STEP 2 – Choose “Backup a profile”
STEP 3 – Choose profile & file destination
STEP 4 – Choose Yes or No.
STEP 5 – Put a checkmark on all boxes
STEP 6 – Backing up in progress
STEP 7 – Backup finished
The resulting backed up file is in “.pcv” format. Pavel Cvrcek, the developer of MozBackup states the following:
What’s a *.pcv format?
It’s a normal ZIP file. You can rename PCV to ZIP and extract files manually too.
Steps of Advanced Method
I have already created the batch files. All you need to do is to modify some paths. There are 3 batch files. One for Firefox, the other for Thunderbird, and the last is for running those two batch files in one go. Here are the batch files:
Download Batch Files
Before running them, you need to properly modify the paths in the batch files. The comments inside will walk you through on what paths to modify and what to keep.
Also, please inspect the files and comment out the behaviour that you do not wish to keep. For example, perhaps you do not want to delete older “.pcv” files, so comment out the section by adding double colons before the beginning of each line, like so:
:: @echo Deleting old Firefox backup file(s)...
:: @echo off
:: DEL /F "D:\Mozilla Backups\Firefox*.pcv"
:: TIMEOUT /T 2 /NOBREAK
After having modified the paths properly, you have 3 choices when running those batch files.
- If you only want to backup Firefox, then simply run Firefox_Backup.bat
- If you only want to backup Thunderbird, then simply run Thunderbird_Backup.bat
- If you want to run both, then simply run FF_TB_BACKUP.bat
Optional Step
Note that the advanced method still requires you to manually double click the batch file in order to run the backup. You can take it a step further and use “Scheduled Tasks” in order to make it silent and run at either startup or at a specific date and time, etc.
That’s all folks! Thank you for reading.
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