Backing up Pale Moon Portable to the bare minimum size

[Martin333]

A basic question:

How do I backup ONLY the settings of the Pale Moon Portable to the bare minimum size?

Before you jump on me saying just to copy the entire folder, let me be clear:

I use about 25 add-ons, of which 23 are active, and also have about 5 themes, out of which 1 is active at any one time.

When I copy the entire Pale Moon folder for backing up, it comes to about 201 MB in size.

As per my understanding, I can simply copy a backup of the ' User ' folder of the main folder to overwrite any newly downloaded portable PM version in order to be update. However, the size of the User folder comes to about 120 MB.

Considering that a newly downloaded portable PM is about 34 MB [ as per https://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-portable.shtml ], does it mean the settings of all my 25 add-ons take up 120-34 = 86 MB ?

Since I can freshly download all the 25 add-ons together with a fresh portable PM, I do not wish to backup the full PM together with the add-ons, but, I wish to backup ONLY the settings of all the add-ons, in order to reduce the size of the backup.

I do not need to backup the Bookmarks, since, I can Export/Import them to/from a html file.

I wish the backup size to be as small as possible.

How can I achieve this? Do I need to use any backup tool like FEBE? Or, do I need to back up any other file(s) like SQLITE, JSON, etc.?

Or, is backing up the entire User folder of 120 MB the only option?

Thanks.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

You can safely exclude cache/cache2, OfflineCache, startupCache, webapps, and optionally Thumbnails if you don't care about the Quick Dial (about:newtab) Thumbnails. These will be regenerated/repopulated as needed.

[Martin333]

@New Tobin Paradigm , Thank You for the quick reply.

I just checked the folders you have mentioned, and here is the size of each.

cache2 = 0 bytes
OfflineCache = 256 kb
startupCache = 2.91 mb
webapps = 2 bytes
thumbnails = 77 kb
shortcutCache = 5 kb
jumpListCache = 0 bytes

So, it hardly serves my purpose, and it appears that backing up the entire User folder of 120 MB is the only option. (My PM clears its browsing history and cache when it closes.)

Any other suggestions are welcome, but I doubt there are any!

Thanks.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Well if you have it clear everything then yeah.. Pretty much it is your Add-ons that are taking up the big bunch of room...

Thing is you are talking about backing stuff up but what you want to do is rebuild your profile then you are gonna have to decide what exactly is important and what isn't.. The problem with this type of granularity is depending on what happens it may not actually work how you expect it to.. Your safest course of action is to just backup the whole profile with the items I mentioned before excluded. Also, never try and use a profile with an older generation version. ie between 25/26/27.. Remember in general profile conversions are generally one way.. Upward.

[Martin333]

Thank You, for the extreme quick reply, again!

[New Tobin Paradigm]

I edited my previous post. Please read it.

[Martin333]

Well, in that case, the best option is to back up the entire Pale Moon folder of about 201 MB in size [instead of only the User folder of 120 MB size], and update PM from there as and when new versions are released - as I currently do.

Thanks again.

[CraigPD]

You can also archive the entire portable program directory or only the User (profile) folder with 7-Zip or the default Windows compression utility to reduce storage size by 50-60%.