Which files can savely be ignored in a ~/.thunderbird and ~/.mozilla backup?

English Applications
1

Hi,

one of the first steps when migrating to a new pc or when having to reinstall openSUSE, is to copy the ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird directories over to my new home directory.
This way i get the same state when starting thunderbird and firefox on the new system as i had on the old system. But i only do this because i do not know what is needed to get for thunderbird:

  • the accound settings (including stored passwords)
  • all of my mails and mail directories

and for firefox:

  • my my bookmarks
  • my chronic / log
  • tabs
  • tabgroups
  • addons
  • passwords

Since i had a near full data loss a few months ago i started to make tar backups every few days, including both the ~/.thunderbird and the ~/.mozilla directories. The problem is, that both of those directories contain a lot of small files (but mostly a lot of files) and because of that the backup process needs a lot of time. So i was wondering if i really need the full directories or if it may be possible to exclude some of its contents?

I noticed some files like:
~/.thunderbird/“Crash Reports”
~/.thunderbird/xxxxx.default/[crashes/datareporting/minidumps/…]
~/.mozilla/“Crash Reports”
and a lot of more, which may can be excluded?

Maybe someone can give me a list of files that are important and which are not?

2

Yes. You can exclude the crash reports in your backup. But the question is ‘how do you backup’. Most rsync based utiillities only backup what has changed.

3

I do two types of backups, a big one once a month by running
tar -cvzf full_date.tgz /home/user
with some excludes (i have an extensive exclude list/file that i use for that )
And a small one daily, where i only include (i use an extensive list/file here) the thunderbird and mozilla directories and some other important stuff.
When those files are created i move them over to my NAS.