Comments on: Sharing Firefox and Thunderbird profiles across a dual-boot

By: Matthew C. Kriner

Matthew C. Kriner — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:32:47 +0000

Blogs RSS feed doesn’t work in my browser (google chrome) how can I fix it?

By: bruce

bruce — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:47:27 +0000

Well, the way I ended up making this work was to reduce the number of messages in my inbox. I had a lot. I spent a night filing them into subfolders and deleting those I didn’t want. I then make a backup with Mozbackup. I copied my profiles folder. Then I restored the backup with Mozbackup. All my messages were there and readable except the few in the inbox. I copied the inbox files from the profile copy I made and that was it. It now works from both XP and Win7.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:18:32 +0000

I’ve discovered an easier way since writing this article, I guess I should have updated! I’m not sure if it will resolve your specific issues, but it’s worth a shot.

Start up thunderbird.exe with the /p option. It will come up and ask you to choose a profile. If you choose “Create Profile” it will ask you for a name. Pick something that you’ll be able to recognize as your “shared” profile later, and select “Choose Folder…” and locate your existing profile.

Although all of this implies that you’re choosing where it is going to create a brand new profile, what actually happens is that it sees your existing profile and uses that one instead. I’ve used it successfully on two different machines now, and it has always worked perfectly. There may be something that olo’s trick misses that thunderbird /p gets right.

By: bruce

bruce — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:51:40 +0000

I’ve been trying without success to get Thunderbird to use the same profile for mail on a Win XP 32 bit/Windows 7 64 bit dual boot. XP is my primary OS. My Thunderbird profile is located on a separate drive, Drive E:. I tried changing the profiles.ini like olo suggests and have tried using Mozbackup. I’ve got the Win 7 install to enumerate the number of emails, but it gets stuck “determining what messages to index” and when I turn that off that message goes away, but I still can’t view my email. I’m going crazy!

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:06:05 +0000

Good questions! I don’t think the junction/sym links will work across different file systems, but olo’s suggestion above should work fine with that (as long as your profiles are stored in a FS both operating systems can read/write).

Not sure about Dropbox, as I’ve never used it, but if you try it out please do let us know how it works for you…might give me a rason to try Dropbox!

By: cyclotis04

cyclotis04 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:27:26 +0000

Could you use this method to share profiles between a dual boot Windows/Linux system? Or would differences in the file system prevent that?

What about using Dropbox and junctions to sync profiles across the web?

Great tutorial, tho. Thanks — I was looking for something like this!

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:59:36 +0000

Good point. I must confess that I have an irrational love for creating junction points, I probably tend to use them even when there are simpler solutions, but they seem so elegant to me.

By: olo

olo — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:04:02 +0000

its no need to use junctions. just point to your profile in profiles.ini, turning “relative” to 0, something like this
[Profile2] Name=xp IsRelative=0 Path=D:\Documents and Settings\olo\Dane aplikacji\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\78ny8sbd.default
i’m using this with success on xp/win7 dual boot.