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Ladies, gentlemen and those still undecided, I'm moving from 18.04 to 24.04. How do I preserve the passwords bookmarks and other data in firefox and mozilla? When I moved from 16.04 to 18.04 I just copied the profiles over. I understand this no longer works. I'm not very familiar with what's under the hood here so please use small words and type slowly.
Thank you in advance.

Chip
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3 Answers3

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The simplest way (and the method I have used successfully over time moving from one version/distro to another) is to set up an account in Firefox then log in to the new instance. This will bring across all your Bookmarks. Use Ctrl+B to display the Bookmarks sidebar.

For Thunderbird, export your email setup/accounts in TB by clicking on the hamburger menu ☰ and select Tools -> Export (perhaps save to a USB stick for easy access) then in the new instance, follow the same path but use import and find the .zip file you save earlier. This will recreate the email accounts in the new instance.

I use imap for emails so the emails themselves are retained on the remote server.

graham
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If I understand you correctly you want to make a fresh install with 24.04 and then only transfer Thunderbird and Firefox profiles from your old Linux installation.

If so you can still transfer your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. Only the places where the profiles are stored have changed because this programms are now installed using "Snaps" instead of "Deb-Files" .

  • Firefox changed from /home/yourname/.mozilla/firefox to /home/yourname/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox
  • Thunderbird changed from /home/yourname/.thunderbird to /home/yourname/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird

As always: Make sure you have a backup of your files!

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Tarator
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On your old system:

Open a terminal (CTRL + ALT + t).

Find your Thunderbird and Firefox data folders in your /home directory:

find ~/ -name "*.default" -type d

On my computer I got the following result:

/home/digijay/.mozilla/firefox/wE1rdCh4.default
/home/digijay/.thunderbird/0th4wRdc.default

Copy these files to a save location, e.g. a usb drive:

cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/wE1rdCh4.default ~/.thunderbird/0th4wRdc.default /media/digijay/myusbdrive/

Make sure that you don't get any errors to prevent data loss! At least check that both folders are on the usb key. In my case I used rsync to copy the folders which is a little saver than cp imo.

On your new system:

You will have to install (or have already installed) the snap images of Firefox and Thunderbird. To use your old data there insert your usb drive and copy the folders from your usb drive to the following locations:

cp -r /media/digijay/myusbdrive/.mozilla/firefox/wE1rdCh4.default ~/snap/firefox/common/
cp -r /media/digijay/myusbdrive/.thunderbird/0th4wRdc.default ~/snap/thunderbird/common/

Start both snap apps and check if everything is there as expected (browser history and bookmarks, old mails and addressbooks).

I migrated my data in this way a while back and it worked well. Should you happen to have more than one email adress configured in Thunderbird (as in my case) copy all profile folders to ~/snap/thunderbird/common/

digijay
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