I'm getting bookmark backup files written every time I run portable Firefox. They are written in the bookmarksbackup folder under the profile folder. How do I disable this? I don't need to have them backed up and I don't want a bunch of junk written to my USB drive.
New: Kanri (Oct 9, '24), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, '24)
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I am not sure if that is possible, I just use a batch file to remove with other cleanup tasks. Works well for me.
Deuce
"Portable Software: Just the beginning..."
Deuce
Portable Software: Just the beginning.
Apparently, this is a new "feature" of Firefox 1.5, rather than PFF specfically. I wasn't able to find any way to turn it off, although I'd really be interested in one.
5 extra files is hardly something to get worked up about. Firefox does a good job of keeping the bookmarkbackups directory pruned, so there are never more than 5 backups at a time. Now if it just kept writing backups endlessly without deleting old ones, that would be a problem, since they'd slowly overrun the drive. However, it doesn't.
Anyway, you might be interested to know that there's a bug in Bugzilla regarding this very thing. If it ever gets implemented, you will get the ability to change how many bookmark backups to keep, and if you specify zero, it doesn't keep any (other than the standard-issue bookmarks.bak).
Personally, it's not so much about the space as it is about the unnecessary writes to the drive. If I'm trying to eject my flash drive when I'm in a hurry, I don't appreciate having to wait for Firefox to finish making backups of my bookmarks that I'm not using anyways. That's really the only reason I would care to have the option of turning it off.
I'm pretty sure Firefox doesn't write more than one file to the bookmarkbackups directory per day (they're dated backups, after all). Once a backup for a given date exists, it won't touch the file for that date again. Also, bookmark backups are a very good thing. Firefox is known to lose bookmarks on occasion, seemingly for no good reason--I've lost mine a number of times--so the backups are handy to have. Even if the option to do it were there, I wouldn't turn them off.
Open you Firefox Profile folder.
Delete bookmarkbackups folder and the bookmarks.bak file
Create a new .txt file and name it bookmarkbackups (no file extension) and click ok
Now Firefox will try to make a bookmarkbackups file but will be unable to.
Fx 1.5 Portable, Open Office 2.0 Portable, Thunderbird 1.5, Firefox 1.5 Pacifica Branch
Fx 1.5 Portable, Open Office 2.0 Portable, Thunderbird 1.5, Firefox 1.5 Pacifica Branch
I had forgotten about that trick. Kinda hackish, but it works. Won't stop Firefox from writing bookmarks.bak all the time though.
Better then nothing until the bug is fixed or an extension is made to kill the process.
Fx 1.5 Portable, Open Office 2.0 Portable, Thunderbird 1.5, Firefox 1.5 Pacifica Branch
Fx 1.5 Portable, Open Office 2.0 Portable, Thunderbird 1.5, Firefox 1.5 Pacifica Branch
Umm, what bug? It's a feature. You only have a bug when something is implemented in code but doesn't work properly. The bookmark backup feature quite clearly works exactly the way it should. The only "bug" is that there's no way to disable it. Technically speaking, that isn't a bug either; it's simply the lack of a feature that a good number of people--including myself--think should be there. Consider this: if I got myself and a thousand other people to say Firefox should open 500 confirmation dialogs every time you refreshed a page, would you consider lack of such a feature a "bug"? I don't think so.
Of course, I'm just arguing semantics at this point, so I'll shut up.