Backing up your Firefox extensions (on windows)

It’s always been a source of irritation to me that whenever my FF installation breaks, or if I decide to reinstall it, I have to hunt down and reinstall all of my thirty-six extensions. If you’re running Windows you can use the following method to back up your extensions:

Create a batch file (open notepad and save the file with a .bat extension) with the following code:

del C:\PATH TO BACKUP FOLDER\ffarchive.zip
7za a -tzip C:\PATH TO BACKUP FOLDER\ffarchive.zip -r "C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox"

Name this script something like ffbackup.bat and put it in the C:\WINDOWS directory (or anywhere that the windows PATH points to). To run the script you can simply type “ffbackup” at the command prompt or in the run box.

This script uses a command line version of 7-Zip , a free WinZip-type program. The first line of the batch file deletes the current archive and the second replaces it with a zipped up version of your Firefox application data.

If you’re interested, the “a” specifies that files are to be added to the archive, the “-tzip” specifies zip as the archive format, the “C:\PATH TO BACKUP FOLDER\ffarchive.zip” is the path to the backup that will be created, the “-r” tells it to zip up the subdirectories too. The “C:\Documents and Settings\username here\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox” is the path to the data which needs to be backed up.

If you clear the cache, history & cookies and ensure that Firefox is closed before you run ffbackup, you’ll help reduce the size of the archive produced.

Steps:

1. Download 7-Zip Command Line for Windows (Unzip it to C:\WINDOWS)
2. Create the ffbackup.bat batch file (also place in C:\WINDOWS)
3. Run it.