Partial Profile transfer

[pcal]

Hi guys,

I'm a contractor working in an office owned by another company who provide euphemistically named "IT Support" via a 3rd party service.

My Win10 Pro machine runs TB (v52.9.1) and FF (v63.0) by choice, and M$ Office 365 by demand of the office owner. Anyway, Outlook has never worked properly since the support company installed it (crashes after every second mouse click), but as their recent Exchange upgrade broke my TB access to company e-mail I have had little choice but to try and use it.

The IT company has spent many hours on remote support trying to fix Outlook, but when I came back from lunch today, they had hosed my complete Win10 user profile and were trying to rebuild it . They had created a whole new user account, into which they had restored the M$ spyware, but had lost access to my FF (and TB) profiles. Fortunately, I do keep a daily backup of both profiles which I have attempted to restore.

When I backup my profiles to c:/user/NewAccount/profilelocation/profile and use the -profilemanager switch to get FF pointing to the new profile, it has access to my plugins, but all history, bookmarks, and saved login credentials are gone.

If I backup the FF profile to c:/user/OldAccount/profilelocation/profile and point FF to that with the -profilemanager, it opens FF with all my data intact.

The same thing is also happening with TB, except that when opening the profile saved in "NewAccount" everything is completely blank and it tries to walk me through setting up new e-mail addresses. Using the profile in "OldAccount" everything works perfectly for most of my e-mail account (save the company account that triggered the IT Support work in the first place).

So, I can login on the computer to "NewAccount", and successfully access my FF and TB profiles saved in "OldAccount" even though I can't login to OldAccount.

I've restored the same backup into both the OldAccount and NewAccount locations...

So why does it work in the old location but not in the new location?

Do I risk any ongoing issues if I continue accessing my FF and TB profiles in a different User account?

The machine will no longer boot into the old User account (they have disabled it somehow), so I have no choice but to use the new User account.

Comments and / or suggestions welcome...

Thanks in anticipation

[Brummelchen]

create a new profile
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Creating_a_ne ... on_Windows
or
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

This article explains how to selectively transfer Firefox user data and settings to a new Firefox profile
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... _-_Firefox

[lasardo]

If making a new profile and filling it with your data does not work (hopefully it will) you could examine this theory. To work properly Firefox & Thunderbird need read and write access to their own folder. Maybe when you restore to user/Newaccount the folder is set as read only, or is set with an owner other than the new user. You may not be able to give yourself those permissions if you do not have admin access to the machine. A solution if that is the case is to create a new profile in a custom location that you think the new user has full read write access to - then copy the contents of your profile backup to that new profile.

[pcal]

To work properly Firefox & Thunderbird need read and write access to their own folder. Maybe when you restore to user/newaccount the folder is set as read only, or is set with an owner other than the new user.

Thanks for you reply.

I really don't want to create a new profile, even if it contains the same data. I have three machines (Win10, Win8.1 and Ubuntu) in three different locations which all have the same profiles stored in pretty much the same locations (allowing for OS differences), and I have start of day and end of day scripts that automatically backup / restore the profile directory as appropriate to a USB3 HDD that I carry with me between them. I don't want to use a cloud service for this as the profiles contain client information I don't want to share with random "other" computers.

I don't believe permission issues are what is happening... The Old user has been erased from the system, and only the New user account is active. They have also changed directory / printer / other network resource access to the new user account also, so the old account would have no access to anything even if it was still working. When I regained access to the machine, the user/oldaccount folder was still there, but was totally empty - I have restored all the content in that folder from my own backup. Similarly, the user/newaccount/profilelocation folder was also blank. I also restored the profile folder to that location from my backup.

If my user account did not have read / write access to these locations, then I would not have been able to do either of these things. And if my user account does have this access, then as I understand it, so should FF and TB when I run them.

I used this computer all day today with FF and TB pointing to the profile folders in the "oldaccount" directory tree - and everything worked perfectly. Logically, this is the tree that "should" give permission errors if such a thing was at the root of the problem. I just don't understand why having the profile in a different directory tree on the same HDD should make any difference to access at all.

[therube]

When I backup my profiles to c:/user/NewAccount/profilelocation/profile and use the -profilemanager switch to get FF pointing to the new profile

-profilemanager is used to open Profile Manager, not to point to a Profile.

Now you can use Profile Manager to create, or open (or delete or rename) a particular Profile.

-profile is used to point to a desired (even arbitrary) location where a profile is to opened into.
-p is used to specify a particular Profile, known to Profile Manager.

with TB, except that when opening the profile saved in "NewAccount" everything is completely blank and it tries to walk me through setting up new e-mail addresses.

(I don't use TB or Mail, but) check to see if there are hard-coded paths in any of the files in your Profile.

You might find something like filename.xyz containing .../user/OldAccount/...

[pcal]

-profile is used to point to a desired (even arbitrary) location where a profile is to opened into.

Thanks for that, I was unaware of the -profile switch. I've always used -profilemanager and created a new profile selecting the folder containing the profile to effect the "pointing" operation. And I thought -p was just shorthand for -profilemanager in the Ubuntu flavor. I've learned something at least today

(I don't use TB or Mail, but) check to see if there are hard-coded paths in any of the files in your Profile.

You might find something like filename.xyz containing .../user/OldAccount/...

Not something I had considered either. Certainly never "deliberately" gave anything an absolute address, but will see if I can find anything. It is a VERY large profile - but I'll have a look...

Cheers