Mozilla Suite : FAQs : Profile Portability

Profile sharing and roaming are not features of the current Mozilla 1.6 Suite, however most contents of a profile can be successfully transferred between computers and operating systems.

Mozilla Backup is a program designed to backup the contents of a Mozilla profile on Windows computers. It supports the Mozilla Suite, Netscape, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

To manually transfer a profile file between two systems (not for beginners):

1. Create a new profile on the destination system.
2. Copy the source file to the new profile folder, overwriting the existing file.
3. If necessary, change the filename to match the designated file in the new profile (such as for *.s and *.w files). Alternately, create or modify the relevant file's pointer in prefs.js by navigating to about:config.
4. When moving profile contents to a different operating system, change the file's line-ending format (LF/CRLF) to match the destination operating system. This is not an issue when transferring between Windows systems.

The file pref.js does not transfer easily, because it contains absolute paths to disk locations based on the host operating system. (Even transferring between different Windows versions is problematic.) It is best to use the file created automatically by the profile manager, modifying as necessary via about:config.