Essential/Minimal Profile Backup

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OK, so this question is for someone who really knows/understands Brave user profiles.

I’m using Brave on Linux Mint 20 and backing up to Backblaze B2 (which is metered, so I don’t want to backup a bunch of needless stuff). I know where the profile directory is located - ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/ – but that directory is close to 1GB and I know there’s a lot of churn there that I don’t want to backup. I care mostly about Bookmarks and History. Cookies would be nice but I can always recreate them. And I use a password manager for passwords so saved passwords aren’t a big deal to me. I can reinstall extensions but it’d be nice if there’s something in the profile dir to tell me which extensions. It would be nice to backup everything in Settings, too but if that greatly increases the size of my backup, I can always recreate that, too.

In the (root of the) profile directory, I see several files that look like they’re what I’m looking for…

  • Bookmarks (plain text)
  • Cookies (SQLite3 db)
  • Cookies-journal (plain text – 0 byte file ???)
  • History (SQLite3 db)
  • History-journal (unknown binary file)
  • Login Data (SQLite3 db – stored passwords??)
  • Login Data-journal (plain text – 0 byte file)
  • Preferences (plain text)
  • Secure Preferences (plain text - 1 line file)

There’s also “Shortcuts/journal”, “Web Data/journal”, and “Top Sites/journal”. Not sure what those are for, but even with those files, the total size is < 8MB. Can anyone dis/confirm that those files (alone - without all the subdirectories) would be sufficient as a minimal profile backup?

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Well, I figured this out on my own with a few hours of trial and error. In case this is helpful to anyone who comes looking for the answer to this question, here you go…

[Accounts]
Bookmarks
Cookies
[databases]
Extension Cookies
[Extension Rules]
[Extensions]
[Extension State]
Favicons
History
[Local Extension Settings]
[Local Storage]
Login Data
[Managed Extension Settings]
Preferences
PreferredApps
Secure Preferences
Shortcuts
[Storage]
[Sync App Settings]
[Sync Data]
[Sync Extension Settings]
Top Sites
Visited Links
Web Data

Your mileage may vary but backing up these files and directories seems to work perfectly. I can’t say for sure whether passwords (in Login Data db file) were backed up because I wasn’t able to save any passwords. (I didn’t login on this test machine with a google account.) It’s possible that some of these files/directories aren’t needed; I included some of them just because it seemed like a good idea. Because of those caveats, this may not be a definitive list - but on my test machine, the Default directory was only 40MB. And on my main/desktop machine, it was only 170MB. (My Extensions directory was the majority of that at ~90MB; if you don’t have a bunch of extensions installed, your Default directory will be smaller.)

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