In the computer world, having backups of nearly everything (Including Firefox profiles) is ultra critical if you value your work and wish to take precautionary measures against disaster. It’s also something that most users neglect. For many users, more data is saved online and in their browser than on their local devices. So this is a great place to start.

Creating a Firefox backup is super simple. Well, the method I use at least. I won’t get into the explanation of why you should do this or what data is included in this profile backup. If you’d like to know everything about your FF profile, check out this guide here. OK, we all got stuff to do, right? So let’s get it done.

Unless you have a custom FF setup and/or a custom windows configuration, your profile folder will always be found in this location:

C:\Users\*YOUR USER NAME*\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

If you know exactly which profile you’ll be tampering with, along with its corresponding folder, you can jump straight to the backup. For the rest of us, we’ll confirm our profile and its folder before backing up.

Soooooooo.

1: Launch Firefox

2: Type about:profiles into the URL bar and hit Enter.

You’ll be taken to the About Profiles Page.

3: Locate the profile you wish to backup.

If its the profile currently in use, no need to open a new window. If so, skip steps 4 and 6.

4: Select ‘launch profile in new browser’.

A new window will open with the selected profile loaded.

5: Check things like bookmarks, history, plugins, themes, etc to be sure you’ve chosen the correct profile.

6: When confirmed, you can close the extra window.

Now that you’ve confirmed the correct profile…

7: Highlight the root directory, without the folder (like the yellow section in the pic) and copy it.

**Make sure you select the Root Directory and not the Local Directory.

8: Open Windows Explorer.

9: Paste the path into the address bar and hit Enter.

It’ll take you straight to where your profile folder is located.

10: In Explorer, select the correct profile folder.

Make sure the folder you choose matches the one listed in your Firefox root directory. (The green section in the pic.)

We will zip the folder into a single file using the built in Windows zip utility. There are two ways to create a zip with Windows Explorer. Choose one and proceed.