Move it and Don’t Lose it!

The reason I am writing is because of Firefox & Thunderbird from Mozilla. Two weeks ago, I got a great deal on a 17″ iMac; a friend told me I “stole it”. However, I did pay for it. After my wife saw it, she asked when we were going to get rid of the Windows machine. Side Note: I have to admit that I am really happy with it.

I am going to try to explain why I love these programs so much. Reason #1 – FREE!; reason #2 – easy to use; reason #3 – the profile is easy to pack-up and move to another computer. I mean ANY computer, if you can install Thunderbird or Firefox on it, you can pack up your eMail Profile.

The reason this is important is because you can back-up, zip, and copy the entire profile. I have been doing this via SyncBack, which is a great free program from 2 Bright Spots. If you open Windows explorer and drill down into your personal Documents folder [you need to turn on “Show Hidden Files”] and into the Applications folder. You need to find the program folder & then your profile. From there you can manipulate the contents.

I have now moved my personal eMail and Firefox profile from Windows, to Linux, back to Windows and now to a Mac. I have not lost a single eMail and all of my bookmarks & other information moved without problems. I did have to re-install my Add-ons, but since they were still listed in the add-on list, it was pretty easy [I did however make a list of them just in case].

My wife, yeah, no problems for her either. The biggest problem that we have run into is that [the] Shockwave [player] has not been updated for OS X, which my son doesn’t even realize. He just doesn’t go to his websites that much [hey he is only 16 mos].

So my hat goes off to the Mozilla team for pulling off such a fantastic feat of programming!!! Woot! Woot!

iron wil

P.S. Quicken for Mac 2006 was pretty easy, however we lost functionality with one of our banks.