How to Export a Chrome Profile

Related

Your user profile in Google Chrome stores data about your browsing activity, including your history, bookmarks and cookies. Chrome does not include a method to export your profile from within the program, but you can manually copy the profile data in order to keep a backup, move your customizations to a new computer or set up a standardized profile for multiple computers in your office.

Exporting Your Profile Data

Before exporting, you may want to clear your cache in Chrome to reduce the size of the profile. Close all Chrome windows before continuing. Press «Windows-R,» type or paste «%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\» (without quotes) into the Run window and press «Enter.» Using the right mouse button, drag the «Default» folder onto your desktop, a USB drive or wherever else you want to save the profile and pick «Copy Here.»

Importing the Profile

To use your exported profile, close any Chrome windows and move your «Default» folder copy into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\ on any computer with Chrome installed. This will overwrite the existing profile unless you move or rename the existing «Default» folder first. If you’re moving to a new computer, you need to install Chrome before restoring the folder.

Version Notice

Information in this article applies to Windows 8.1, 8, 7 and Vista. It may vary slightly or significantly in other versions.

How to migrate Google Chrome profile (extensions, cookies, etc.) to another Windows installation?

This question has been asked a million times on the web (example) but I have found no solutions that actually work, so I’m asking it again. Please actually read the entire question before posting.

The question is pretty simple. I have installed a second copy of Windows on the same machine (same OS — Windows 8.1 — with the same product key and all) and I’m trying to migrate everything to it.
However, when I try to make the new installation of Chrome use my old profile, it wipes some of the data (e.g. all of my extensions), claiming they are corrupt, while preserving others (e.g. bookmarks).
Needless to say, the profile isn’t actually corrupt; it works just fine in my old Windows installation. And yes, I’m using the same version of Chrome (version 47 x64) and all.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how or why it does this. I’ve even looked at the Chromium source code and can’t even figure out where Chrome makes the decision to reset the profile, and what it bases this decision on. I’ve tried using Process Monitor to figure out how it detects anything is going on, and I haven’t found anything.

Can someone explain to me what is going on and how I can continue to use my old profile as-is, intact in my new Windows installation?

Note: Due to the frustratingly low amount of information on this issue and high number of non-working «solutions» on this site and elsewhere on the web, please, don’t make random guesses. Only post an answer if you have reproduced the problem and can reproduce a working solution to it, or alternatively, if you can point to the exact line causing this in the Chromium source code. Thanks.

How can I Transfer Google Chrome’s Data and Settings to another Google Account?

I use Google Chrome and I have 100s of bookmarks, history, search preferences, search engines, extensions, and apps installed.

I want to have a new Google account, and I need to move everything from my current account to the new one.

I did sign in to another Chrome and transferred my bookmarks using the Export/Import option. How can I transfer all the Google Chrome data, saved usernames and passwords, and everything else to the new account?

6 Answers 6

Copy the user data (find it at

/.config/google-chrome on Linux) then make a new user profile from the settings and delete the other one. Copy back the data and wait for it to sync.

[EDIT] According to Aminah Nuraini (in comments) the following is no longer the case.

I’m just going to post this here for greater visibility (as I found it very useful) for future people who come across it, credit goes to user234593 :

Go to the menu and at the top under signed in as youremail@gmail.com click disconnect then click sign in and sign in as a different account.

When you click disconnect it warns you that all your data will stay on the computer (which is exactly what you want) and when you sign in with the new account the things get synced to that account

An old question but the current answer is out of date and I stumbled across this on my quest today (would simply comment this if I had the available rep).

Now the process is:

1. go to Menu (the 3 line/hamburger sybol in the top right) and click ‘settings’
2. Select the ‘disconnect’ button which is one of the first buttons at the top of the main section of the settings page you just opened. Confirm you want to leave your data on the PC (do NOT select to clear bookmarks/history etc..)
3. Close settings tab and sign-in using the man icon in the title bar. This will prompt you that another user was previously signed in on this machine and you can either clear their data, or you can ‘sign in anyway’ and merge the data. The latter is of course the one we want here.

Import Chrome user profile from another computer

So I recently performed a clean reinstall of Windows as my system was starting to lag horribly.

I made sure to backup my Chrome user profile (C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default) to another partition before doing this, but simply copying that folder over the new install of Chrome resulted in an error message saying «Some settings were reset — Chrome detected that some of your settings were corrupted by another program and reset them to their original defaults. Learn more».

My only option from there was to click «Restore all settings to defaults», so now I have my old cache, history and bookmarks but no extensions or saved passwords from my old install. Those last two items are what I really wanted to keep the most!

I had followed this same procedure in the past to successfully transfer an entire installation, but Chrome has obviously been updated many times since then and one of those updates must have made this «security fix» (I’m sure that’s what they would call it, but I call it an unnecessary nuisance!).

So does anyone know of a way to extract saved passwords and extension info from an old user profile? Even if I could just get a list of all the extensions that I had installed, so that I could manually reinstall them one by one, that would suffice. But the passwords are the most critical thing; I had username/password combos saved for

200 sites and don’t remember them all. Even if I did, I really don’t like the idea of having to painstakingly log in to each site again to save the info again!

EDIT: Just found this question which confirms that the ability to simply copy one profile over another has been disabled since Chrome 55 🙁 Should’ve looked into this before reinstalling! D’oh!

New Chrome profile: how can I migrate all browser data from one profile to another?

I’ve had a good look for about an hour on this and have come up blank. Apologies in advance if I’m wasting everybody’s time with an elementary question. Running Windows 7.

I’ve created a new Chrome profile that I want to use in preference to my old one. I’d like to migrate history, extensions, cache, saved passwords, form fill data etc from old to new. I migrated bookmarks exporting/importing an HTML file, but after that I’m stuck. I did find this http://goo.gl/mXsDdt but the UI’s changed and I can’t duplicate the instructions. I feel like I’m missing something really obvious.

PS: Tangent, but this is connected to a move from Gmail to a personalised domain, paid Google Apps account, chosen in part (stupidly and naively) because I imagined the transition would be within Google and therefore simple. An hour with tech support, 3rd party software, imports and exports, manual mail migration. Might as well have been taking stuff across PCs with Outlook 2003.

3 Answers 3

After some excessive research, I came across this article that I believe is what you are looking for.

Here is the essential information from the link:

In this Post I’ll show you how you can move entire Google Chrome Data including History, Bookmarks, passwords, Saved Cookies etc. from one Google Account to another and that too offline, you can Sync It online anytime after that. Hello Everyone, Got new mail id right? Now want to get your Google Chrome Data, Settings, and Bookmarks from your old account to new account? It’s easy to get everything back on new account and there are several ways to move bookmarks but you really need this post if you want to move History, Bookmarks, Saved passwords, Settings in your Google chrome and all.

Well let’s get ahead saying you have now two mail IDs, oldid@gmail.com and newid@gmail.com. You are currently signed Google chrome as oldid@gmail.com and want to move entire data to newid@gmail.com. So what you need to do is, sign in to Google chrome using your new ID. Yeah its newid@gmail.com For this Open Chrome://Settings In Users section, click on Add new user.. Choose the Icon and Sign in to new user account in your Google chrome. Lets this name as newuser, So you have two user in your chrome say olduser and newuser. You have entire data in your olduser and want to move to newuser. Just tap Windows key+R to open run In Run type appdata Now open \Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\ Let me tell you, now in this user data folder, you can see two folder name Default and profile1 Default folder contains entire data of Profile0 that is olduser. And profile1 contains the Entire data of newuser. You can open default and see the list of files named Application data Extensions Jump list Google profile icon History Last session, Open tab And so many olduser account related data.

Now all you have to copy or move these all data (in case you want to transfer entire data) else selected data like history and session etc from \default\ to \profile1\ Now open Google chrome’s new profile See the entire data is present in your new chrome user. How to Transfer Google chrome data from one Account to another account online. What we have done is Moved Data from older account to new account in local computer. It’s still not available in online account. To do this: Just let the Google chrome sync the data once it get online and your Entire data will be saved to your new Google chrome account with newid@gmail.com username. It’s really helpful those who are migrating from one Gmail account to another.

Bottom line This is really very helpful and easy method to do so, you can go to similar location in your older version like Windows XP and all.