Firefox – How to Move a Firefox Snap User Profile Back to Home Directory

firefox

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?

Best Answer

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.

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Check that icon-themes and sound-themes connections are missing:

snap connections firefox

Enable connections:

sudo snap connect firefox:icon-themes gtk-common-themes:icon-themes
sudo snap connect firefox:sound-themes gtk-common-themes:sound-themes

source

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How to Recover Snap Firefox Secret Profile Data After Removal

Seems you were looking for your firefox-profile in the wrong location, you looked in ~/snap/firefox/ for the .mozilla-folder but you should have looked in ~/snap/firefox/common/. Please see this answer for reference.

Switching to the snap version of firefox should have copied your old firefox-profile from ~/.mozilla/firefox to ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox. You will be still able to examine your snaps user data even if the snap is removed now.

When you remove a snap, all user data will be removed but a snapshot of the user data will be saved. Important to know is the fact that the snapshot will be kept for only 31 days.

Only if you remove a snap with the --purge-option like in snap remove --purge firefox, all userdata will be lost, no snapshot is created.

You will find the snapshot as a zip-archive in /var/lib/snapd/snapshots/. Since this folder is locked you will need root-privileges to find the snapshot, copy it to your home-directory and take ownership. The following example uses the wire-snap, I don't have the firefox-snap installed in my system:

~$ sudo ls /var/lib/snapd/snapshots 
[sudo] password for mook: 
5_wire_3.24.2939_237.zip
~$ sudo cp /var/lib/snapd/snapshots/5_wire_3.24.2939_237.zip ~/
~$ sudo chown $USER: 5_wire_3.24.2939_237.zip

Now you can use your graphical archive-manager to open and browse the snapshot and hopefully extract your lost firefox-profile from it.

Best Answer

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