How To Backup/Restore Firefox Bookmarks, Web Browsing History, Extensions Or Other Add-ons When Planning To Re-Format Harddrive (OS)

You can make Firefox opens and browse as usual even after you do a fresh OS reinstallations or formatting the harddrive (where the OS were installed), no dialog box appears as you use the browser for the first time and most importantly, your bookmarks, passwords, web browsing history, extensions or other add-ons still intact and functioning.

Follow this simple guide on how to backup and restore all those important and useful items. For this, I'm going to use Windows 7 but it's all the same with other operating systems, the differences is only the file path that I'll list it later.

1. At Windows explorer > Organize > Folder and Search Options > View > tick at Show Hidden Files, Folder and Drives radio button > Apply > OK (you have to enable the hidden options because the file path that we're going to backup are hidden).


2. Go to C:/Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox copy and save the Firefox folder to removeable media or another harddrive partitions. If you open the Firefox folder, you can see all of your previous settings, add-ons, extentions etc. in it .


3. To restore the backup after you've done with reformatting, install Firefox as usual and copy/paste the backup Firefox folder into C:/Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\ , overwrite the folder if the Firefox folder already exist, make sure you've show hidden files and folder options enabled first in Folder Options.

That's it. Open Firefox and surf as usual.

Below is the location list of Firefox folder path in different Operating Systems.

Windows Vista & Windows 7	Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox
Windows 2000, XP & Server 2003	Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
Mac OS X	~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Linux and Unix systems	~/.mozilla/firefox