Expected Steps Select a profile from the profile list Click Move Profile Receive a dialog prompting for a destination directory. Expected Results Profile is moved to new location, and reference to profile is updated.

The tough part here is updating all of the absolute paths that are written into files within the profile dir - mainly prefs.js. I've been wanting to write the paths within the profile dir as relative paths - then they could be moved painlessly without any effort beyond updating the registry entry. Or, something could be done with nsIPrefBranch::GetChildList(), and operate on the prefs which were an nsILocalFile. That's ugly though.

Profile Manager FE bugs --> me

Conrad, I haven't looked into this yet, but does the backend support this currently?

Blake - no. If my comment from 2001-04-27 12:49 is what you're talking about. It's no sweat for the backend to do this. The part that would be work is changing all the consumers of absolute file path prefs. There are other reasons to solve that problem as well and I know how to do it.

changing QA contact

--> ben

*** Bug 98137 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 124727 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I've marked this a dup of Bug #124727. I also added the dependancy from that bug. Here are some additional comments from Bug #124727 that may be useful. From: johann@ai.univie.ac.at This is a good idea, but would need http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125721 to be implemented first, since there is no way to specify the alternate profile location? From me: This bug is more about haveing an automated way to move the profile directory and update the related pref.js settings that refer to the hard coded profile location. From: johann@ai.univie.ac.at Maybe I am completely wrong here, but isn't prefs.js *part* of the profile directory? How can one move the profile directory (under linux it always is ~/.mozilla) and still have mozilla be able to use it? If I want to move .mozilla to a different disk there is no way to tell mozilla where to find it AFAIK. From me: You are, of course, absolutely correct. Now, I think what I did was to edit mozregistry.dat (which on a Win98 system resides in the Windows directory) to point to the new location. Now, the file isn't really intended to be edited, so I had to be very careful to not break any of the other data in the file. I don't know if Linux has such a file, nor where it would reside. ---- end of copying. Enjoy.

>I don't know if Linux has such a file, nor where it would reside. ~/.mozilla/appreg

*** Bug 163520 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment #9 I think the "move profile" button should be used when you want to store the big user data in another place. For example: all the mail, news, cache files. So, we could separate the mozilla user files in 2 section, the ones that can be moved and the ones that can not be moved. For my case, I want to store all mozilla big files to a network drive in WinXP, because I use roaming profiles and 60MB of mozilla data makes my login time too long, because it has to be move to my WinXP profile. So, I would have, say 5MB of mozilla files in my WinXP Profile and the other 55MB of mozilla data(mail, news, cache) in one network drive. For Linux, this 5MB should always be in the ~/.mozilla/ directory and the other 55MB wherever you want(an NFS directory maybe). I think this solution can solve the Linux issue and also win no need to modify a system wide file (\windows\mozregitry.dat)

*** Bug 182565 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

5MB? Why so much? My C:\Documents and Settings\malcolm\Application Data\Mozilla folder has three items: * File: pluginreg.dat (13k) * File: registry.dat (2k) * Folder: Profiles (178MB) There are no more files under the Profiles folder until I get all the way down in to the salted directory. Surely all we need is another very small file at the top level (e.g. profiles.dat) that maps profile names to locations. Yes yes yes, I'm sure moving the profile directory will break many things as people do like using absolute paths for some reason. Besides this one small file, what else would we need in the *Windows* profile directory? Am I missing something on other platforms? Question: is there any concurrency protection in profiles? I.e. can the same profile be opened by two or more users/sessions concurrently?

There is concurrency protection in profiles. Well, put it this way, I had Mozilla running, and then I started Netscape 7.0 and tried to select the same profile as was being used by Mozilla. I got an error message about the profile already being in use.

> Surely all we need is another very small file at > the top level (e.g. profiles.dat) that maps profile names to locations. registry.dat does _exactly_ that, and I even think that these days it does only that. however, moving a profile needs to adjust the path in prefs.js and other files.

It the meantime, profiles have to be moved by hand, see http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/mozillaprofiles.html .

Mass reassign of my non-Firefox bugs to ben_seamonkey@hotmail.com

*** Bug 233070 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I'm running into this problem on Firefox (out of disk space on c:, need to move profile to d:) is this a separate bug, or does 'Mozilla Application Suite' (or at least the profile manager, in this case) cover Firefox for this issue as well? Funny thing is, I was able to move profile 'Alpha' by creating a new profile Alpho, copying Alpha's data into it, and deleting Alpha. I wasn't able to do the same with profile Bravo; I created Bravu on d:, copying Bravo's data in, and deleted Bravo. Then on starting Firefox, the UI came up but clicking didn't change focus to the location bar, it didn't go to the start page, etc.

I have filed similar bug for Thunderbird, as bug 280852. Someone suggests that it should be marked as a duplicate of this bug, but I'm not completely sure, as it refers to another application and this is a user interface problem and not the engine problem.

(In reply to comment #17) > http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/mozillaprofiles.html http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder is more to the point, IMO. Guys, can we see some action on this bug? It's over four years old!

Approaching on *6* years.

As far as toolkit is concerned this is wontfix... we are removing the profile manager in bug 214675. There is bug 539524 to provide a profile manager when the current profile manager is removed and if you would like the requested functionality added to it feel free to reopen this bug and move it over to Testing -> Profile Manager.