Sometimes, The Best Things In Life Are Free

That’s certainly the case with MozBackup, the simply fantastic software utility designed to backup of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird profiles (if you don’t use Firefox, you should – IE7 and Safari don’t compare). According to their website, MozBackup “allows you to backup and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache etc.” However, the unmentioned value of this app is that it is the easiest to use and most reliable tool around for transferring email stored in a Thunderbird profile from one machine to another. As an example, I had to purchase a new laptop for my overseas business trip and if you’re like me, my current and archived email files are a critical component in doing day to day business and MozBackup was able to move everything over to the new machine and even maintained all of my account settings, special tags, and status indicators for messages in my inbox that have yet to be filed. This might not seem like a big deal but let me point out that the size of the file containing my email profile and messages tipped the scale at 2.5GB (that’s a lot of email).

In the end, MozBackup is one of the superhero web apps that turns a frustrating and time consuming exercise into a simple task that can be completed in less than 15 minutes (even for mega-size email files like mine). It is a perfect example of the good that comes from open source software. Best of all, the app is completely free but I highly suggest you show them some love by leaving a donation if you find their product useful.