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Copy profile of Supermium (non portable app) to an other machine

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svenholm
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Copy profile of Supermium (non portable app) to an other machine

Hi everybody, this is a portableapp-forum, might be the perfect place to ask this:

I want to copy my (non portable) Supermium profile (all profiles in it and the default profile from %localappdata%) to an other machine, but discovered I'm forced to use chrome.exe --disable-machine-id on chrome (Supermium) 126 on the target-machine, if not all my extensions will be destroyed because Supermium recognizes it is running on an other machine. I changed the machine-id code in a config-file, but this didn't work as I remembered back. Even worse: When I use Supermium at the 132 release from win32ss' github, that --disable-machine-id flag won't work anymore and after some launches my extensions got destroyed.

Best regards,
Sven

John T. Haller
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By Design

This is by design. Chrome-based browsers lock their profile to a specific machine. As such, it's highly recommended you don't use them unless logging into Google. This applies to local and portable usage.

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svenholm
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Thanks for your answer! And

Thanks for your answer! And there is no way around this? So if I use the new supermium releases 132+ I can't just modify the "Local State" file and set a new machine id or somehow generate one that fits to my actual machine?

John T. Haller
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Not Sure

I don't know Supermium well enough to know what changes they've made to the code that could affect this. Perhaps someone more familiar could respond or you could try asking in their github.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

svenholm
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My thoughts were "I may ask

My thoughts were "I may ask here because here are more the guys around that know how to make apps portable" instead of asking in win32ss directly. But thanks anyway, will try it there Smile

Stephen Leibowitz
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Portability Issues

The App Notes for Supermium Portable has several sections, including these two:

    Passwords Not Saved Between PCs By Default
    The Chrome Portable App Notes also mentions this issue, but it gives a workaround: “We’ve added password portability as an advanced option, though, which you can enable by reading the help.html file.” This workaround is not given for Supermium Portable.

    Some Settings/Extensions Locked Per PC

But rbon at Simply moving the user data discusses two Ungoogled Chromium flags that are available in Supermium:
#disable-encryption
#disable-machine-id

PA should consider using the #disable-machine-id flag.

The situation with passwords is more complicated. Both portability and encryption are desirable. PA could use the #disable-encryption flag or inform users that it is available. Some people use VeraCrypt (available from PA) or other software for encryption. It is not necessary to encrypt the program. For performance, one might limit encryption to SupermiumPortable\Data\profile.The PA workaround for Google Chrome would also be a good encryption option for Supermium.

John T. Haller
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Some Issues

If you change the flag at any point, it'll break your existing profile. It must only be used with a fresh, from-scratch profile.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Stephen Leibowitz
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Keeping Profile Data

Supermium supports Google Sync, although it is not clear if that would help populate a profile in this instance..

The browser can export/import passwords (using Password Manager) and bookmarks. Other data can be exported in human-readable form using Google Takeout

The words that have been added to the browser dictionary are stored in Custom Dictionary.txt. You can save a copy of the file to a new profile. For the Default profile, it is stored here:
GoogleChromePortable\Data\profile\Default\

There are extensions to backup and restore browser data. PortableApps.com mentions Session Buddy. Floccus is a widely used extension for bookmarks and tabs. There is the Cookie Backup and Restore extension.

There are even extensions to backup and restore extensions. The simple ones export a list of the installed extensions and can use that list to install from the Chrome webstore. They do not restore any extension settings. Others will do a complete backup/restore of extensions.

John T. Haller
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Settings You Can Use To Make Portable

You can make Supermium more portable by copying the AppNamePortable.ini from the SupermiumPortable\Other\Source directory to the SupermiumPortable directory and renaming it to SupermiumPortable.ini. Open it in your favorite text editor and change the line that reads AdditionalParameters= to AdditionalParameters=--disable-encryption --disable-machine-id and then saving it. You should do this with a new profile and change these settings within the advanced config in the app, too. This should make it portable but will result in your passwords being stored unencrypted and your Chrome settings vulnerable to modification by outside apps.

I've added this info to the Supermium Portable homepage as well.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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