Physics Hacker

Recently my harddisk crashed and I used this opportunity to reinstall my system. Everything went fine, but getting my user certificates back turned out to be a bit tricky. For Grid Computing and administrating a Grid Site I need my certificates to be stored in the browser. As I recently renewed them, I haven’t done a backup of them (shame on me) so I couldn’t just reimport them in my newly installed Firefox 4 (beta). Here is what I did to get the certificates back from my old Firefox profile:

1. Find out where your profile folder is located. This Mozillazine Page might help.
2. Quit Firefox if it is still running
3. Go to the profile folder of your new Firefox installation and backup the files cert8.db and key3.db
4. Copy key3.db from your old profile folder to your new one if you want to restore your private/user certificates
5. Copy cert8.db from your old profile folder to your new one if you want to restore all other certificates you had installed in Firefox (e.g. root certificates and host certificates)