copying all chrome config data to different user (SOLVED)

Gilles Gravier ggravier at fsfe.org
Sat Mar 24 06:29:23 UTC 2018


Glad it was solved. Sorry for the drama of people telling you who you
should be steering your boat without knowing why you are steering it the
way and direction you do.

There are also some browser backup tools out there that might do this
automatically for you.

Personally, I use the browser account sync on all machines I use. When I
set up a new machine, I log into Chrome (well, Chromium) and I immediately
get all my stuff. That said, it doesn't handle the issue of multiple
profiles and you still have to log into each of them individually before
you can use them. But at least with the account sync, any profile you log
in is (almost) instantly properly configured with all bookmarks, logins,
passwords...

One simple directory copy (of 2 directories) is an elegant solution. Create
a script to do that. Put it on a shared drive (say dropbox or Google Drive)
and you don't even have to remember the actual directories to sync! :)

Gilles

2018-03-24 8:09 GMT+08:00 David L <david4lists at gmail.com>:

> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 12:50 PM, David L <david4lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have historically had problems with my desktop environment when I use
>> the same user home directory on a dual boot system (eg, when I have 16.10
>> on one partition and 18.04 on another). Therefore, I like to use different
>> user home directories for myself for each environment and copy or symlink
>> directories that I can share without compatibility quirks. I would like to
>> be able to have ALL data related to google-chrome accessible in both
>> systems. I have dozens of user-data-dir's for various things I work on,
>> each with their own stored passwords, cookies, etc. Based on some google
>> searches, I thought I could copy everything I needed between the two home
>> directories by copying the user-data-dir directories and the
>> .config/google-chrome directory, but my stored passwords do not transfer.
>> Does anybody know how I can get everything I need (and nothing I don't
>> need) from one home directory and put it in another to get google-chrome
>> (or chromium-browser) to just work on a dual boot system with isolated home
>> directories for the same user?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>           David
>>
>> PS - I don't want to have to export passwords and import them... it seems
>> like I should be able to just copy the right files/directories, which I can
>> do from the command line quickly for dozens of user-data-dirs that each
>> maintain different passwords.
>>
>> Thanks to Colin Law for pointing me in the right direction, I figured
> this out.
>
> In kubuntu, this was the missing stuff:
>
> .local
> └── share
>    └── kwalletd
>        ├── kdewallet.kwl
>        └── kdewallet.salt
>
> I didn't need anything from .kde, nor .config... only:
>
> .local/share/kwalletd
>  /home/david/chrome-user-data-dir*
>
> Extracting those directories is all I needed to get multiple google-chrome
> profiles up and running with passwords working. I suspect I would have
> needed .config/google-chrome if I used the default profile without a custom
> user-data-dir, but I have not verified that suspicion.
>
> I assume there is an equivalent directory that would need to be copied for
> gnome, but I haven't investigated that either.
>
> Thanks,
>
>          David
>
> PS - For those that questioned the motivation for doing this, here are the
> times when I found I needed this functionality:
>
> 1) When I was on vacation once, I wanted to log into a web site for which
> I had forgotten the password, but I knew it was stored in a specific
> profile to which I had access via scp. But copying the profile directory
> alone didn't work.
> 2) When I'm beta testing a new Ubuntu release, before committing to
> upgrade, I test the environment for a few days and make sure that
> everything I do on a daily basis (including accessing multiple chrome
> profiles) is working well. So I copy a subset of my home directory to a
> temporary account on the beta test partition.
> 3) When I have a hard drive crash and I want to extract all of the stuff
> from my backup that I use on a daily basis without years of cruft.
> 4) When an ubuntu upgrade behaves poorly with respect to my desktop
> environment and I want to blow away almost all desktop related config and
> start from nearly scratch, I want to pull a minimal set of stuff from my
> backup and start with a fresh home directory wrt environment, but I still
> want my chrome passwords.
>
> And as for why I have many (10 to 20 ... I exaggerated when I said 100)
> chrome profiles, I work for multiple companies, and I have gmail accounts
> for several of them. Google tools are much happier when run from
> independent profiles. Also I do a lot of genealogy research, and I maintain
> a profile for each relative whose DNA I have tested on 3 different testing
> sites and I have the passwords cached for each of the 3 sites for each
> person. When I am researching a specific person, I run from that google
> profile and can get into all of the sites without diddling with which login
> I need to use. I have shortcuts to open google-chrome for each relative and
> each employer and it works very well for me except for the now-solved issue
> with migrating the profiles.
>
>
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>
>


-- 
Gilles Gravier - ggravier at fsfe.org
Using Google Apps web mail
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