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I'm trying to use the Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) for everyday surfing. For convenience reasons I use bookmarks and sometimes install some addons. When a new version of the TBB comes out, I lose all of my bookmarks and addons. What is the best recommended way to upgrade?

In the past I tried to extract the new TBB file over my old files. This often led to errors and Firefox refused to start. Currently I export my bookmarks and import it into the new version.

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    For people who stumbled across this question, please note that question and answers are not relevant today anymore since Tor browser updates now keeps the bookmarks and addons.
    – m894v5n74v539nm8
    Sep 10, 2016 at 7:01
  • The question doesn't reflect the actual situation and could lead users in a wrong direction.
    – Jens Kubieziel ♦
    Sep 10, 2016 at 18:31

2 Answers 2

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The recommended way to upgrade, unfortunately, is to export your bookmarks et al, unpack the new TBB into a new directory, and import your bookmarks there.

Most of the time it is safe to just unpack the new TBB over the old one, but every once in a while it will break things in a confusing way (for example, the last breakage changed the SocksPort and since Firefox caches the old proxy parameters, your new TBB would seem broken the first time you ran it).

So you're doing it correctly.

As Steven points out, this approach also discards your old Tor datadirectory, including discarding your entry guards. If you upgrade to a new TBB every 6 weeks (the schedule that Mozilla puts out a new Firefox update), you will thus end up rotating your entry guards more often than is safe. So if you want, you should copy over your Data/Tor/ directory, or at least the Data/Tor/state file.

In the not-so-distant future, we're hoping to have the Firefox update mechanism working in TBB 3.x:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4234

so hopefully things will get smoother over time (including letting you automatically keep your current Tor state file).

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    Should you also copy over your Tor data directory, so that your guard nodes stay the same?
    – Steven Murdoch
    Sep 26, 2013 at 13:11
  • Great point. Added to above text.
    – Roger Dingledine
    Sep 26, 2013 at 19:37
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    What is the staus of this fix??
    – user3088
    Jul 4, 2014 at 19:02
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Exporting your bookmarks and importing them into the new version is currently the easiest method for maintaining bookmarks between releases of the Tor Browser Bundle.

As for installing additional addons, this is not recommended (or supported).

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