Today I accidentally deleted my primary Firefox profile (mostly through user error). I was cleaning testing profiles out via the Profile Manager and managed to delete default. Since that actually deletes the whole profile folder from disk instead of moving to the trash can, I just said “Fuck”. This is a profile I’ve had for a while. It had a lot of history, passwords, bookmarks, extensions. All of it lost in an instant.

Luckily though, I’d set this profile up to use Firefox Sync years ago when early versions of Weave were just being released. At that point I’d set it up for backup primarily. Since then I’ve synced that profile to multiple computers.

The nice thing about it is I lost almost 0 time. I created a new profile, set up Sync, and within a couple minutes had the vital information I needed in my profile. I lost a couple things: extensions, some prefs. I don’t use many extensions so that’s not a huge issue. I don’t even remember what prefs I’ve tweaked, but I’m going to guess not too many. Some prefs were restored by Sync, but there’s only a handful that get synced. I even had all of my tabs a click away on the list of tabs from other computers.

If you’re not using Firefox Sync, it’s built in to Firefox 4 and is also available as an extension.