Previously I was one of those users who did their best to live with the old/original/legacy Edge that dated back to Windows 8 (originally codenamed “Project Spartan”). However, I would often find myself using Chrome, especially because of the multiple profile capabilities. From time to time I would need to use Firefox, but those were few and far between. Chrome really was it.
The new Microsoft Edge built on Chromium is fantastic. From the first moment I used it, I’ve never gone back to Chrome or Firefox. The story is the same for every person I’ve introduced to the browser. It gives you the best bits of Chrome, along with the best bits of the old Edge, and then a whole lot more we’ve not had before.
Anyway, I digress, you’re not reading this because you need to be converted.
One of the best features of Edge is the ability to sync your profile, including passwords, history, open pages, and more.
The Challenge
Unfortunately, there’s no way to be able to sync the existence of the profile itself. What I mean by that, is that if you want your profiles on another computer – you need to create each of them, sign in, sync, adjust the sync settings, and hope it all works.
If you’re moving from one machine to another, or wiping & re-installing Windows, this can be potentially a frustrating exercise – especially when you have lots of profiles. On my daily driver, I have 17 profiles in Edge. Some are to the same M365 tenant but different accounts (for example one is a user, one is an admin), some are for client environments, etc.
I also have a laptop that lately is hardly used due to a virtual halt in travel, however when I do get into the office and need to do something – I don’t have the profile set up.
The Solution
I put the call out on Twitter a while back asking if anyone knew of a way to backup/export/copy/migrate profiles as I had done it once before by copying folders from a profile path but it wasn’t that successful.
Luckly one of my work colleagues, Alex Laurie, rose up to the challenge, and wrote a PowerShell script that exports and imports Edge profiles with only the slightest amount of effort.
You can either use the PowerShell script available on GitHub or install the PowerShell module directly into Windows.
Operation of the script / module is straight forward:
- Specify the Edge channel you want to use (i.e. Stable, Beta, Dev, Canary)
- Specify the output folder for the exported file
NOTE: You can’t have Edge running while you use the script as it will fail.
Once that’s done, simply pop it into your OneDrive or on a USB drive to get it over to your other machine.:
This effectively takes a copy of all of the Edge profile folders, cache, images and all. So, if you’ve been going for a while you can end up with a large zip file. The export on my machine took 2.5 hours and created a 16GB zip file.
In the end I opted not to bother importing it due to the size but did take the opportunity with my new laptop to set up all the profiles afresh. I then exported and imported to my other computer within minutes and was happily going again.
As it only copies the profile content and configuration, I still needed to sign in to sync each profile – but it still saved me the hassle of having to remember each one of them and do it again.
Also published on Medium.
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Hi, I tried to use these steps to transfer all edge profiles to another windows profile on the same PC, but that did not work. Is that possoible at all? And if so, how? Many thanks!
I don’t know sorry. The maker of the PowerShell module created it with the same user in mind.
Edgar – did you try moving/copying “%localappdata%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data”
I tried doing this but for some reason it is not working on windows 11, nothing is happening when I am pasting the ‘Edge’ folder I copied from my old device
Thanks for sharing this Loryan! I am about to get a new laptop so am looking for a way to move my +- 15 Edge profiles across (similar to you – various 365 tenants etc.). I am interested to know though – do you sync every one of your profiles? Do you sync it using the Microsoft account for that particular 365 tenant? How do you handle profiles that are not associated with a 365 tenant? E.g. I have a profile for admin UIs for various on-prem sites – these are in a separate profile to my ‘day to day’ profile which I use for general browsing, and which is linked to my AAD Connect-sync’d Microsoft account. Wondering if there is a way to sync multiple profiles to the same Microsoft account or … ? Thanks!
Good question Ray, I haven’t figured the profile sync part out yet entirely.
I mean, I do sign into each tenant on the relevant machine to sync to that AAD account, but I’d love to have a way that when I set up a new profile on one machine it automatically sets it up on the other machine and vice versa.
Outside of that I don’t have any accounts that are used for non-M365 purposes.
Thanks for the reply Loryan. For now I will at least sync all of my 365-related profiles – I had not thought of that prior to reading your post. At least that covers most of my profiles and means I can just create a new profile, and log in with it, and have it bring across my tabs relating to that client.
Why make this an image instead of plain text….For everyone annoyed about this, here is the code for you to copy:
Export:
backup-edgeprofile -Channel Dev -ExportPath c:\temp
Import:
restore-edgeprofile -Channel Dev -BackupZip c:\temp\edge_backup.zip
Awesome Loryan. Cheers
Doesn’t work in 2024 on Win11.
Good to know!
Perhaps could still work but needs a tweak, however my need isn’t the same as it was 3 years ago. 🙂
Probably something with my company setup of my computer, but even on a freshly booted computer, it says that Edge is running and will not perform the backup. Pity!
I’ve just taken this for a spin. The zip creation warns with “Exception setting “LastWriteTime”: “The DateTimeOffset specified cannot be converted into a Zip file timestamp.
Parameter name: value” and in the end the zip contains only some reg keys. I will dig into the PS code and see if perhaps there’s an easy fix.