I use Firefox (LibreWolf with Mozilla sync) on multiple devices. To have my tabs, extensions and history easy available I use Mozilla for syncing that data.
Would it be possible to just use a generic sync service like rsync or something, to sync the profile folders and every file in it?
Or would that break or corrupt data?
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Keep in mind though that with Firefox Sync, all your data is encrypted, whereas a generic sync of your profile folder will have all that data on your sync server without encryption.
Fair point, so I need to trust this server or control it myself etc.
An article was posted recently that you can host the Firefox sync server yourself. Supposedly a bit fiddly, but doable. If you’re considering self hosting something anyway, might as well be the right tool for the job.
Hope these help:
You can self host Firefox sync although it’s a pain. Or you can sync only bookmarks using an extension like xbrowsersync or floccus. Otherwise using the official Firefox sync is the best option.
XBrowserSync and Floccus don’t sync to local files, unless you self-host the server or a webDAV respectively.
Lofloccus makes it easy to spawn a local webDAV server (making Floccus save your bookmarks to local files) which I can then sync with rsync or Syncthing or whatever system I already like. It’s only available for Windows and MacOS though.
Also can easily run a local webdav server with SFTPGo on Linux/BSD/OSX/Windows: https://docs.sftpgo.com/latest/installation/
Or use it directly with your devices to sync instead of going through syncthing.
In theory yes, in reality I just couldn’t make it work. The browser just writes way too much data to the profile dir, and it’s all across tiny files which depending on your sync solution makes things really slow.
And on a setup like this, you’re limited to only using the browser on one device at a time, otherwise it blows up with sync conflicts, so you can’t use your laptop and desktop at the same time, for example.Nowadays I just copy my profile once to a new device (because FF Sync doesn’t bring over extension settings or the Toolbar layout at all for some reason) then continue using Sync for bookmarks and history.
Thnx, so practically not doable. Also file and directory structure differs between PC and Android adding further to the problem.
I would love to see something like that. I started self hosting Firefox sync, but it’s not working too well and I don’t have the time to troubleshoot and test things.
I’d suggest weekly system image backups and daily differential/incrementals. A couple of minutes a day saves everything (and you will sleep soundly)
