Mozbackup will backup and restore Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Firefox profiles, including email, bookmarks, history, saved passwords, address books, and other details.
It will also back-up and restore installed extensions for both Firefox and Thunderbird.
I don’t know about you, but as far as I am concerned the most annoying thing about re-installing Windows (or getting a new computer) is backing up and transferring email if you use a local client.
If you use Thunderbird, however, Mozbackup provides a quick and easy solution for backing up your email as well as your Firefox bookmarks and saved passwords.
I used Mozbackup to backup and transfer my 1.5 gigs worth of email to my new laptop; here are some notes:
- Backup: Please note that my first attempt at a backup only partially transferred my email, leaving out the last 6 months worth or so. Not sure why this may have happened, but I went back and compressed all of my folders before creating another backup. This time it worked perfectly.
- Options: When creating a backup file you can choose exactly what it is that you want backed-up. You can choose whether you want a password protected backup file, whether you want passwords saved, address books, cookies, certificates, downloaded files list, etc.. You could also backup any extensions (as in plugins) that you have installed for either Thunderbird or Firefox, although this may not work in all cases (worked just fine for the extensions I had).
- Interface: Mozbackup has a user-friendly wizard interface, making the backup and restore process simple and easy.
- Compression: My 1.5 gigs of email (i.e. the size of the email folder in application data) was backed up to a little more than 400 megs. The size of the backup file was approximately the same when I backed up uncompressed as well as compressed email folders.
- Programs supported: Compatible with: Firefox 1.0 – 2.0, Thunderbird 1.0 – 2.0, SeaMonkey 1.0a – 1.1, Mozilla Suite 1.7 – 1.7.x , Netscape 7.x.
Not much more to say about this title, except that the next version (to be released sometime in Q2, 2007) will be completely re-written from scratch and will also feature support for Sunbird and Flock. Most notably, it will feature automatic backups from the command line, which would enable automating Thunderbird backups through scripts.
If you use Thunderbird then you need Mozbackup; it is an excellent way to back-up your email. However, just to be safe, make sure to compress your files before you start the backing-up process.
Compatibility: WinAll.
Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 876K). Also visit the program home page.
