firefoxprofilesnap
I've just migrated from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04.
My firefox profile was previously located in the .mozilla/firefox home folder.
Now I can see there is also a profile in the same name in snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox.
When opening theabout:profiles, I can see this is now the snap one which is used.
Does it mean that I can remove the .mozilla/firefox folder?
Thanks for your help
Kind regards
Dave
One option is to find Firefox process in System Monitor and open its properties. Snap version runs from /snap location with Security Context set.
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
If you are happy with the new Firefox as it is, then yes, you can delete the old folder. However you may have some important saved password or other info in the old Firefox directory, consider to backup it, instead of deleting.
If you have just started to use the new snap version and you want to have your previous Firefox settings you also can move the old directory to the new place (when Firefox is not running).