Profile manager not renaming profiles

[dfoulkes]

Maybe I've forgotten and I looked at some of the docs about this and could not find the answer.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken I thought that ...

1. You close Firefox
2. You start the profile manager and it lists your profiles
3. You rename those profiles to a new name
4. The manager not only renames those profiles within it's control files but also renames
those profiles on disk (you know, the profile names in the File Explorer.

As part of my moving to Quantum ESR I kept my old profiles and the new ones were named NEW MAIN and NEW MISC. Now that everything is good I decided to delete my old profiles and their data files... the profile mgr. deleted them from (I guess its own control file) and from the normal area on disc. So some weeks later I decided to rename my profiles to get rid of the NEW part of their names ... worked fine in the Profile mgr but when I looked at the profile names on disk they were still named with the NEW as part of them... tried to rename them using the normal Windows renaming process..it worked but when I start up Firefox those profiles could not be found....putting back the word New in Windows fixed that last problem.

So now I have one name in the profile mgr and another name in disc... am I missing something?

[Brummelchen]

am I missing something?

yes. the name of folder is not important, the profile name is.
profiles.ini has two entries - for name and for path. the PM is showing the name.
you need to rename path and change it also in profiles.ini.
its very simple when understood.

[dfoulkes]

Thanks Brummelchen for the info... I used to know and remember that but it has been so long since I was renaming profiles ... I now have changed the names in Windows file explorer 'and' in the profile.ini file and all works fine now. Let's see how long that I can remember .. again

[Brummelchen]

to add - changing folder name could result in data loss. i never experienced it* but it should be possible. this could be a possible reason for it.

* i rename my profile folders to current firefox build, so version number and folder name are similar and this i do for nightly, beta and final. i also never had issues when using my profiles with firefox portable on other computers.

so you can rename folder and change entry in profiles.ini and watch yourself.
the .xyzquirks123 extension is just for security but reality showed us that it never did matter and adware/malware could work on it.