I was looking at the list of reviews at the Firefox Add-Ons Contest Squidoo Lens and noticed several I had not heard of before. Of course, this is that the purpose of the contest is to get more exposure to the extensions. An interesting one I found is called Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE).

This extension is great for testers such as myself who run multiple profiles or the casual Firefox user who has experienced the pain and heartache of dealing with a fried profile. I’ve said before the most difficult part of creating a new profile is not just the you lose all your bookmarks, preferences, saved passwords, etc. Nope, those are the easy parts to recover. However, the task of not only remembering all the extensions you have (currently I have 33), but finding and installing each individual extension is a major pain!

With FEBE can save yourself a lot of time and heartache. Further you can also synchronize multiple browsers (home and office) with the installable xpi files it creates. FEBE does all of this (either manually or automatically):

• Extensions
• Themes
• Bookmarks
• Preferences
• Passwords
• Cookies
• Your entire profile
• and more…

I had to stop my automatic profile back-ups I had talked about in the Backing-up your Fx Bookmarks & Profile post due to issues with X Drive. Keep in mind the back-up is stored on your hard drive in a location you specify. At this time it appears FEBE can not backup to a CD Drive. But since the extension does the bulk of the work locating all the needed files, it shouldn’t be too difficult to go in on your own and backup the backup directory to a CD-R, Tape Drive or web based backup service.

FEBE works with Firefox 1.5.0.X or 2.0.0.X for Windows XP (may work on older versions) and Linux. Windows Vista users see How To FEBE on Windows Vista. MAC user can try out (still in development) beta version 5. This extension is about 358 KB and once installed can be accessed via the FEBE option in the Tools menu.  It will also add an icon on the bottom left of your status bar.

Information Sources: Mouse Runner’s Firefox Guide & FEBE Add-on