A couple days ago I explained in the Bookmarks: Backing up and Recovering post how to recover your missing bookmarks if Firefox ‘eats’ them. But I didn’t give much thought to if something major were to go wrong, until Freesitebuilder left the following comment:

“Great tip – I’ve lost my bookmarks twice when they simply disappeared from Firefox, and a third time with a HDD failure.”

Good point! Five days worth of backed-up bookmarks aren’t going to do you much good if your hard drive is toast! Now, if you are doing regular system back-ups to CD-R, Tape Drive or online services such as AOL XDrive, AMD LIVE! Media Vault or Mozy, you can back-up your current bookmarks.html as well all the files in the bookmarkbackups folder. This way once you have reinstalled Firefox all you need to do is copy the bookmarks.html to your profile folder.

But if you are going through the process of backing-up your bookmark files, why not just back-up your entire profile? That way if something does happen to your hard drive you won’t have to rebuild your entire Firefox profile from scratch. Simply specify your back-up program to include your entire profile folder. This way, your bookmarks, saved passwords and forms, extensions and other personal settings are all backed-up. Once you have installed Firefox and are ready to recover your profile simply follow these directions from mozilla.org and you will be up and running in no time!

I use both XDrive and AMD LIVE! Media Vault for my archiving and back-ups. I have XDrive setup to run nightly to back-up my documents and other important files including my profile folder.