Whoops – where has my Firefox configuration gone? oh snap!

On Ubuntu Firefox now comes as a snap package.

Snaps are containerised software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run.

All that is true, but nowhere did it say that the Firefox configuration is now in a different place.

Before snaps, profile and configuration files were stored in the ~/.mozilla directory. Now they are stored in ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/

I had configured my backups to include useful directories including directories ~/.*, and had excluded all ~/snap directories because I could easily download the programs when needed (or so I thought).

I had a problem with Firefox so I deleted the snap files and reinstalled them – to find that my configuration information was not available, and was not backed up.

I’ve now moved to Vivaldi browser.

Lesson learned

I checked where the profiles for vivaldi are stored. They are under ~/snap as well.

Looking into what files are backed up, I had specified which directories I wanted. I think I’ll now say backup all files under my userid, except for….. I have a 2TB solid state external disk drive, so I should have plenty of space as I’ve only used 59 GB of backed up data.