How can I move a Firefox snap user profile back to its original place in the home directory?

Mario

11/18/23, 2:53 PM

For a technical reason, I had to switch from Firefox snap back to the traditional Firefox. I used that straightforward guide to accomplish that step.

I then realised that the Firefox snap (installed when I changed to 22.04 a few months ago) moved my original Firefox profile from my home (~/.mozilla) to the snap folder (~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla). Upon the required removal of the snap package, my profile (even without using --purge) actually was removed as well. I thought there was something wrong but it seems to be the normal behavior of snap remove .... Although I managed to restore my Firefox profile from /var/lib/snapd/snapshots (with snap restore ...) and to copy it manually to ~/.mozilla, starting the traditional Firefox does not seem to make use of that copied profile anymore. I'm used to copying Firefox profiles but here it failed for a reason that is not obvious to me.

Switching back to Firefox snap brings me back to a working configuration. But that is unfortunately not what I want. What do I need to take into account when copying my profile from ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla back to ~/.mozilla and use the Firefox deb package?

220

1 + 2

firefox

mook765

11/18/23, 3:26 PM

If you copy only a profile it will not be used unless you go to `about:profiles` and choose it to be used. Or copy the whole `.mozilla`-folder from `~/snap/firefox/common/` to `~/`.

24601

11/19/23, 3:15 PM

(as requested by the OP). Under 20.04 and earlier versions I created a Firefox account. We I first loaded 22.04 with the snap version, I logged in to my FF account and all my stuff was immediately available. I since changed 22.04 back to the APT version, logged in to my FF account as before and all was well with the world.

Score:1

Ubuntu

vanadium

11/20/23, 1:39 PM

Make sure no instance of Firefox is running and move the .mozilla folder under ~/snap/firefox/common/ to your home folder.

In recent versions of Firefox, a different install (i.e. the Mozilla APT version instead of the snap) will not automatically pick up your existing profile. First time after the move, start the profile manager (firefox --ProfileManager) and select your profile.

+ 2

Mario

11/21/23, 3:35 PM

Thx, @vanadium. This saved my life :)

Mario

11/21/23, 5:30 PM

Sure, done now :)

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