Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Migrating Chrome Profiles to per-channel directories

If you run custom chrome profiles you might see a message like this in the terminal if/when you launch chrome from the commandline:
[9894:9894:1210/140235:WARNING:sxs_linux.cc(139)] User data dir migration is only possible when the profile is used with the same channel.
It seems chrome recently made a change to where user profiles are stored. Previously different tracks (stable, beta etc.) all used the same profile like:
~/.config/google-chrome/myprofilename
Now however, these are split out by track like this:
~/.config/google-chrome/myprofilename
~/.config/google-chrome-beta/myprofilename
and if you run chrome beta with a profile that has also been used with chrome stable then chrome won't use it, and does a half-assed job of warning you about the problem (i.e. it prints a warning to the terminal as above, which you will only ever see if you're running it interactively). My reading of the bug was that this data wouldn't get migrated automatically, but you could migrate it yourself.

I did this for each profile and it seemed to work fine, all my settings and themes look correct:
cp -a ~/.config/google-chrome/myprofilename ~/.config/google-chrome-beta/

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