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Comment by badamp | Hacker News Reader

Can’t you restore all the settings from a TimeMachine backup or similar? They’re just stored in files in the profile directory.

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I upvoted you (because your suggestion is a good solution) but let’s be real, most people don’t have backups, even developers.

In my experience as a developer companies don’t even issue me a USB backup drive to run time machine on my work issued MacBook Pro unless I specifically request it.

Please don't normalize that behavior. Not having regular backups is dumb, like not wearing seatbelts. On a Mac it's so easy -- just plug a drive in once a week or so and Time Machine does its thing. A 1 TB hard drive is cheap, far less than the value of a lost day.

Why once a week? Leave it plugged in, you get more granular recent backups, and don’t have to remember to plug it in.

macOS will create local backups (space permitting) and then dump them all at once when connected to the Time Machine drive. Though of course you won't have the backups from between the last time you connected the drive to the time your computer was hosed.

I get that but what I’m saying is, why limit yourself to a “real” backup once a week? What benefit does it have to just leaving the drive plugged in?

I for one like to have some protection from crypotolockers. And power surges.

Some people use laptops, and want to move around with those laptops. Keeping an external drive connected kinda gets in the way :)

As I said elsewhere,

I'm in a weird position where this particular Firefox on this particular machine didn't have a backup.

I'm waiting on a new drive to come in the mail as we speak.

So chew me out. Sue me. I didn't have a backup for this one Firefox instance out of half a dozen.

But please don't normalize the expectation that my browser deleting everything with an automatic update is somehow a user error.

Microsoft doesn't get a free pass, neither does Mozilla.

I don't backup my computer anymore because everything I have is in the cloud anyways. I have a git repository with all of my scripts, a command I run to set up my system from scratch, and all of my files in Google Drive/Github. Any Steam games I play either automatically store my information online, or aren't important enough for me to worry about. The only think I would loose if my computer broke was my downloads folder, pretty much.

Do you back up your browser profile? Are there parts of it which change infrequently enough to version control?

The only thing I customize in my browser is the color scheme, and my script updates that manually. I mean I have some bookmarks and extensions, but those don't take more than 10 minutes to restore.

I agree, I use time machine on both work and home machines , and I also keep an additional offline drive for my home machine that I sync regularly and then move to a different area of my home and leave unplugged (providing security against a ransomware or other malicious attack).

But most people just don’t and a response of “restore from your backup” is unhelpful to them :(

Why? The comment that sparked this conversation is such a niche and unlikely problem that I really don't see backups as a good cost/benefit decision just to defend against things like that. All of the data I care about is backed up. I really don't see the point of full OS backups.

And that's firefox' problem how exactly?

Because if firefox hadn't nuked the user's config we wouldn't be talking about how to recover that config. Any time the advice is "restore from backups" then the product has exhibited a poor user experience. And this isn't because of some hardware failure, this is just the software bungling an update flow, with no special notice to the user or any obvious way to recover.

Or it was an OS bug, or sunspots, or cosmic radiation... There's a reason people have backups.

I'm not blaming Mozilla for sunspots. I'm blaming Mozilla for nuking my config with an automatic update. Let's stay on topic.

Do you similarly give Microsoft a free pass when automatic Windows updates delete your grandmother's photo album?

I do. I've learned over the years that any MS update could nuke my computer. And what I'm saying is on subject, you have no proof that Mozilla nuked the configuration. It could have been caused by circumstances outside their control. I've been using FF for years and years and never lost anything, presumably including after this so-called failed update.

That's the software equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome.

It's my problem, which Mozilla created. It's their responsibility.

Really replying to @tlb here (reply depth is maxed), but what's the Time Machine equivalent for ? Most of the pre-rolled backup solutions I've used either have you point to a specific set of content folders (like Photos, Music, Videos, etc.), and do a terrible job at handling profile data, system files, and everything that's "in use" when using my box is handling some kind of state.

I'm in a weird position where this particular Firefox on this particular machine didn't have a backup.

Of course, Firefox should not be pushing rushed, unfinished releases as they have been, they should never destroy data even one update every 10 years, because it is supposed to be stable software.

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