copying all chrome config data to different user

[David L]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:29 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 March 2018 at 18:06, David L <david4lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I understand that there are some cloud-based ways to sync passwords, but
> I'm
> > looking for a way to just clone an arbitrary number of chrome
> configurations
> > from one partition to another with a wild card command at the command
> line.
> > This should be possible... I just need to know what subset of
> configuration
> > data to copy. user-data-dirs and .config/google-chrome does not appear
> to be
> > enough.
>
> Why?
>
> Seriously, I think you need to ask this.
>

I have dozens of profiles and I simply want to have them seamlessly work in
the same computer when using an alternate boot partition. There is no
reason that the use of the cloud should be necessary to share data on the
same computer and there is no reason that per-profile GUI interaction
should be necessary to do what I want to do. If there is a command line
command to clone profiles (including passwords), that would be completely
acceptable... I could write a script and wildcard clone all of my profiles.
Is there one? Otherwise, it's very inconvenient to have to open each
profile (twice I assume, once on the old to set up export, and once on the
new to set up import) and perform any level of GUI interaction to clone the
environment I have working on another partition.


>
> You want an additional external way to duplicate a built-in function
> of the software, which is to say, one that will therefore by nature
> _conflict_ with the built-in function. That is unwise.
>

Not really... I want a command line backup and restore of configuration
data for an application. Here's an example use case that really happened to
me. I went on vacation last summer and cloned my entire user directory to
eSATA drive in case I needed to handle any work issues while I was gone. I
was able to use chrome including saved passwords from that cloned disk. But
then I had a problem with that disk... no big deal I thought... I'll just
ssh into my desktop and copy the small subset of the data that I used on a
daily basis (instead of hundreds of GB of full backup). The problem was
that I didn't know what subset to copy and my internet connection was too
slow to attempt to use VNC to do any sort of per application GUI
interaction to export configurations.


>
> If you just want to share the profile, share the profile. Put it
> somewhere both installations/accounts can access and symlink it. Job
> done.
>

First, sharing the profile by sharing the user-data-dir doesn't work for
passwords. Second, when I went back to 16.10 (because some things are still
broken for me in 18.04) and ran chrome on one of the profiles that I had
used from 18.04, it said the profile was broken because it had been used by
a newer version of chrome. So the safe thing to do it copy the
user-data-dir rather than symlink, but neither symlinking nor copying
user-data-dir works, so the question of copy vs symlink is moot. Somewhere
outside of .config/google-chrome and user-data-dir profile directories
there is some configuration info that has passwords or enables the
passwords to work and that's the configuration info that I'm looking for.
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