Peter Staack Product Testimonials & Reviews

I'm a big advocate of backing up sensitive data and configurations... Okay, honestly, I'm probably a little OCD about it (at work, they call it eOCD. Regardless, I've never lost any vital data, and any time I have to reinstall a system, it's often a piece of cake.

My install of Firefox 3.0.1 is pretty heavily customized, from search engines, specialty character encoding, proxy-bank switching, bookmarks, and dozens of sweet add-ons. As such, I regularly backup my profiles folder. I copy it, archive it using WinZip, and make parity files. Although my data is safe, and I can recover it. But I'll have to shut down Firefox in order to back it up, which isn't always easy while I'm working, and although I can copy the configuration files I often have to re-install the extensions from scratch. Chuck Baker's Firefox Environment Backup Extension (a.k.a. FEBE) makes it a lot easier to automatically backup, and later reinstall, all facets of Firefox.

With a few simple mouse-clicks, you can back everything up without even shutting down Firefox. You can configure what is and isn't backed up, and where it's backed up (allowing you to later archive the data). Best of all, you can schedule automatic backups. Then, when you need to reinstall, or if you want to migrate your configuration to another system, you can install FEBE and run a restore, easy-peasy. So far, it's worked great in my tests, and duplicating my Firefox configuration between work and home PCs.

I'll still do manual backups, but I can do so a little less frequently, knowing FEBE is taking up all of the slack. And, best of all, it a free add-on to Firefox, available here. If you use FEBE, and find it as useful as I have, be sure to give a small donation to Chuck Baker for his great Firefox Environment Backup Extension (link at the bottom of his page).

Cross posted on my personal LiveJournal - FEBE Review. Wow.