Archive Your Browser & Mail Settings With MailBrowserBackup

Let’s say for a moment that you have a new Windows PC. Alternatively, imagine that you’re just about to wipe the hard disk clean and run your Windows restore disks.

As fun as it is to reinstall and then tweak your browsers and mail programs to just the way you like them, and then retrieve all your messages from backup files, it would be way easier to backup all those settings and messages in a few simple steps.

That’s where the free MailBrowserBackup comes in. It comes in a ZIP file and requires no installation; Just run the program from within the uncompressed folder.

To test MailBrowserBackup, I created a new Windows user profile with a freshly installed Firefox profile and then used MBB to backup, and restore my own Firefox profile to the new user. The process is as simple as selecting the location of the archive files.

Once you have your MBB files, you can move them to a USB portable drive, for example, or email them to yourself. You only have to run the program again, this time hitting the “Restore” button.

The current version can only backup the settings and profiles of a few select programs: the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the Thunderbird, Windows Mail, and IncrediMail email clients, the FTP program FileZilla, and file-sharing program eMule. The author promises support for all the major browsers in the near future so this is definately a utility to keep an eye on.

On the subject of backups, here are five ways to backup your email, and another program, KLS, that backs up both mail and browser profiles. Please let us know in the comments section what your favorite browser and email backup tools are.  Cheap is good but free is much better!