Migrating Firefox from PC to Mac with MozBackup

by Ian

I recently reformatted my home computer, which is a Mac, in the hopes that I would be able to clean off all the garbage I’d put all over it.  After backing up my files, photos, music, movies and all the important things I reinstalled.

And then I recalled that I had wiped out Firefox and all my saved settings.

Now after I complained and whined and fussed over my loss, I went looking for a utility to migrate my work computer settings to my fresh home computer.  In my searching I came across a Lifehacker post about Moving Firefox Settings to a New Computer.  It recommends downloading MozBackup, a utility which will back up all your Firefox settings on a PC – and when I say “all your settings,” I mean cache, cookies, history, extensions, bookmarks and more.  Yes, EVERYTHING.

So after using this to back up my Firefox settings I began looking for a way to import the files to a Mac.  Well I had to look no further than the previously mentioned Lifehacker post, where later on in the post, it states that the PCV file is simply a proprietary ZIP file.  I promptly renamed the file extension from PCV to ZIP and extracted it with Stuff-It.  Now it’s in a folder ready to be copied over from it’s home on my desktop to the Firefox profile (located in your home directory » Library » Application Support » Firefox » Profiles » GIBBERISHSTRING.default) and the moment of truth hits.  Am I going to ruin my Firefox installation by copying the files over?

I grit my teeth and drag the files and overwrite my default Firefox profile with the contents of the zip directory.

And it works.  Flawlessly.

It’s so nice to be able to do a bit of research online and save 5-10 hours searching for my extensions, installing them, updating, importing my saved searches, toolbars, bookmarks and setting up all my accounts again, but all that was saved by working smarter rather than harder.

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