Now that I’m triple-booting my computer (XP, Vista & Ubuntu), it’s a pain managing all of the Mozilla profiles – emails downloaded on one OS will re-download on the others. Passwords saved in one OS’s browser won’t be reflected on the others – until now: I’ll show you have all of your Operating Systems use the same profiles!

Setup

You need to decide which Operating System you want to be your “Master” – which OS’s would you like all “slave” OS’s to read/write to. I chose to keep XP as my master because I’m only “test driving” these other OS’s for now.

How To

Getting this done is pretty easy, first we need to understand where Mozilla products save their profiles:

Firefox

Operating system Folder(s)
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile Name>\
Windows Vista C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile Name>\
Linux ~/.mozilla/firefox/<Profile Name>/

Thunderbird

Operating system Folder(s)
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile Name>\
Windows Vista C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile Name>\
Linux ~/.thunderbird/<Profile Name>/ or possibly ~/.mozilla-thunderbird<Profile Name>

For the sake of easy, the rest of this tutorial will cover Firefox. The same infomation will work for Thunderbird, just make sure you pay attention to what directory you’re writing to!

Inside the Firefox’s folder, there is a configuration file that tells the programs where to look for the profiles:

In Vista, the file’s location would be:
C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini

Open this file. It should read:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/<Profile Name>.default

On each of our slave OS’s (ones that are not the master), we need to change the last two lines:

  • Set the IsRelative variable to 0
  • Set the path to the directory of the OS you want to be the master. If you are setting it to be XP, then it should read:
    Path=C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Profile Name>.default\

Make sure you leave the master’s profile intact. It doesn’t need to be changed because it is already writing to the correct directory.

You can delete the slave’s old profile folder’s if you wish – just make sure you leave the profiles.ini file, the programs will look for this file to find out where the profiles are!

What About Other Locations?

Now that you know were these files are stored and how to change the profile locations, you can change the location for all profiles (let’s say you want all three OS’s to read/write to a backup drive) – basically making them all “slaves”. Just change the Path variable on all there installs to that location, ie:
Path=X:\backup\<Profile Name>.default