firefox profile persistence w/o loooooong backups

[fizzdigit]

So I read of the firefox profile taking up a lot of space and, therefore taking a long time to backup. I guess this only applies to people who have a persistent /home and /opt but something I found that you could do:

either make another partition OR another folder in one of your persistent directories (home or opt) also preferably owned by "tc" and in the "staff" group. or at least be writeable.

in home/tc/.mozilla/firefox/ edit the "profiles.ini" file.
Change "IsRelative=1" to "IsRelative=0"
Change the "Path=" line to your new chosen partion/directory
copy over all of your old profile files to this location
or run firefox for the first time and it will be created there

basically, it moves your profile.
as long as this directory isn't on .filetool.lst or IS on .xfiletool.lst
it won't be backed up, yet still will be permanent.

That way you can keep your 90 days of history and that giant urlclassifier3.sqlite file and everything else if you want lol  . If you have the space in the first place. this was just an interesting thing I did so...thought I'd share.

[maro]

Maybe it' just me but I'm a bit confused about this OP, but here is my "logic":

(1) IF you DON'T use persistent home (i.e. you are NOT having 'home=SomeDeviceName' in your boot loader configuration as a TC boot code) AND you are using Firefox AND you have not done any "tweaking" to either the "white-list" (i.e. '/opt/.filetool.lst') or the "black-list" (i.e. '/opt/.xfiletool.lst') THEN don't be surprised that the backup (and likewise the restore) takes quite a bit of time (and diskspace) thanks to all the files under '~/.mozilla'.

(2) Now, IF you using persistent home (i.e. you ARE having a 'home=SomeDeviceName' boot code) THEN make sure that you exclude '/home' from the backup by either removing it from the "white-list" or adding it to the "black-list" (the former is probably the more logical choice for most people). If you have not done this step of "house-keeping" when setting up your persistent home, now would be a good time.

But all is not lost for users with option (1): they could still add some specific entries to the "black-list" and hence eliminate the "worst offenders". I believe there were some threads about this already in this forum, but I'm now running a bit out of time and hence won't be searching for those to point them out here.

[fizzdigit]

The point of this was that you can keep your ENTIRE firefox profile if you want.
AND do backups that dont take forever.
none of the whitelisting/blacklisting of individual files in /home/tc/.mozilla is required because you can keep them all (barring any space requirements you may have)
eh.

[Guy]

fizzdigit, you are making it excessively complicated.

If you use persistent home and opt, you can delete every reference to the home and opt directories from /opt/filetool.lst. It is that simple. That is all you need to do.

The only things you need to backup, are changes in directories other than home or opt.

I don't use backup at all. I use persistent home and opt, and make new extensions for anything I want to save not in home or opt, such as printer setup.

For people who don't use persistent home, I recommend removing your internet browser's cache from backup, by adding the directory to /opt/.xfiletool.lst.

[fizzdigit]

Oh neat. OK I'm lame I think i missed the point of the backup function  then because I was under the impression that anything you want to keep between boots was supposed to be "backed up". So anything under /home or /opt will still be "saved" between reboots?

Well i must have been misconfigured then, because the last time I installed this I did not have that behavior and I had to add EVERYTHING I wanted to .filetool.lst. in order to have permanence. I dunno I'm still learning.

[tinypoodle]

Seems like you are mixing up different modes.
In default mode everything is running in a tmpfs and indeed you have to back up all data you wish to keep.
When specifying e.g. home= then that particular top level directory would permanently reside on a persistent storage medium instead.

[beroje]

--------------------------------------------------
76.0M   /mnt/sda3/Datos/firefox4.0b7
76.0M   total

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56.0K   /mnt/sda3/tiny/tce/mydata.tgz
56.0K   total

[Jason W]

The custom built Firefox's (minefield4, namoroka, shiretoko) have the urlclassifier disabled so that file would not be present.  Also, the default cache size is set to 20MB, and default history is shorter, so you should never have more than about 25mb size of the ~/.mozilla directory.  That way runtime memory and backup size is kept to a minimum.

The official firefox.tcz extension has that urlclassifier and default cache size, so the ~/.mozilla directory will keep growing and necessitate the use of xfiletool.list.