On 16/03/2019 03:56, Paul wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

Can you rename the profile folder to something different from the
randomly-generated string at the same time as moving it (and tweaking
the .ini as shown above), or is that string also referred to in other
places?

I think that's the only place it is referred to.

Correct. My profiles.inis for Pale Moon, Firefox, & Thunderbird all
have absolute paths to directory names of my own choosing on the D: drive:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Moonchild Productions\Pale
Moon\profiles.ini:
[Profile0]
...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\USERNAME\Pale Moon

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefo x\profiles.ini:
[Profile0]
...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\USERNAME\Firefox

[Profile1]
...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\USERNAME\Firefox (debug)

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\pr ofiles.ini:
[Profile0]
...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\USERNAME\Thunderbird\Mail

[Profile1]
...
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\USERNAME\Thunderbird\News

Obviously, when setting this up, you have to
Exit the relevant program
(wait for Task Manager to show it's really gone);
Copy the profile to the new drive/directory;
Rename it with the desired name;
Edit profiles.ini appropriately and save the result;
Restart the program.

Note also that mostly the data structures for Firefox & Pale Moon are
compatible, so if you want to copy your settings and passwords from one
to the other, you can copy the above directory contents as a whole or
the particular file containing particular settings that you want to
copy. I can't comment on whether the same is true of Firefox &
Thunderbird because I've never tried to use the latter as a browser, but
if asked to guess I'd say 'most probably'.

Note also the two Thunderbird profiles above, one for mail, one for news
posts - so far this has completely prevented me from accidentally
sending a private mail to a public newsgroup, which is an error I see
occasionally from others. Similarly, I have a separate FF profile for
debugging my own website when I'm working on it.

More generally, I try and force all installed programs to save their
data on the D: drive. This means I need only back-up the system C:
drive once a month or so, less for a PC that isn't used much - which I
do using Ghost which creates its backups on the data D: drive - but
can still back-up incrementally the data D: drive every night in about
10 mins or less, longer only if there is a new Ghost image or a number
of new GetIPlayer downloads to back up.