How to move Chrome profiles to another computer
Morfiade is a Google Chrome profile manager for Windows. Each account lives in its own profile with its own cookies and proxy and stays signed in, and switching between accounts is one click.
Moving to a new machine is the moment you find out how much was resting on one disk. Fifty profiles, each with a live session, and signing into every one again means several days of email and phone confirmations. Let us look at how to avoid that.
What actually needs to move
- Cookies and site data — they are what saves you from signing in again.
- Extensions and their settings.
- Which proxy belongs to which profile — otherwise all fifty windows on the new computer come out through your home address, and that will show.
- Your own order: names, categories, notes.
Why simply copying the folder is not always enough
A Chrome profile is a folder on disk, and you really can copy it. But some of the data inside is encrypted with a key tied to the Windows account on this computer. A folder copied directly to another machine may give you empty passwords and lost sessions — while the size suggests everything is there.
So it is better to move it not as files chosen by guesswork but by export: the program takes what is transferable, in a form that makes sense.
What actually moves from your everyday Chrome, and what does not
Let us be blunt, to save you time. If you mean the profile you use every day — the one that opens from the Chrome icon on your desktop:
| Moves | |
|---|---|
| Bookmarks, history, autofill, settings | yes |
| Extensions and their settings | yes |
| Passwords | yes, but as a separate step — Chrome's own export to a file |
| Site sessions (cookies) | no by the program; manually — with an extension from inside Chrome |
Sessions are the one thing that the program cannot take along, and that is Chrome's own restriction rather than a shortcoming on our side: since version 127 it encrypts cookies so that they cannot be read outside their own folder, and since version 136 it has closed the workaround as well. The full explanation is in a separate article.
Which leads to the key point about timing: sessions become transferable from the moment you start signing in to sites inside Morfiade profiles. The app won't pull them from regular Chrome retroactively — why that is and what is still possible to do by hand is covered in a separate article. You can export your cookies with an extension and load them into a profile — step-by-step instructions in the guide.
How it is done in Morfiade
On the old computer
- Tick the profiles that are moving (or select all).
- "Export" — you get one file with the profiles, cookies, proxies, categories and notes. The "Cookies — website sessions" checkbox is checked right away; extensions come along only if you check the "Extensions" checkbox.
- Release the licence with the button in the program if you are done with the old computer: you get a code for rebinding.
On the new one
- Install Morfiade, point it at a folder for profiles.
- "Import" — pick the file and choose which profiles to take; you can change the profile name so as not to overwrite your own. When the program offers to load cookies from the archive — agree.
- Check a couple of accounts: the sessions should be alive.
- Rebind the licence to the new computer with the code you got.
Export and backups work even with a closed licence. You can always take your own data with you, whether anything is paid for or not.
What breaks most often
The proxies did not come along. The addresses transfer, but if your proxy provider ties them to your former IP, they will only start working once you add the new address in their panel.
The session dropped anyway. Some platforms tie a session to an address and a fingerprint. If both changed in the move, you will be asked to sign in again — that is the protection behaving normally, not the transfer failing. Hence the practical advice: move profiles together with their proxies, rather than "move first, hand out addresses later".
A different Chrome version. The browser on the new machine may be noticeably newer. That is not an issue, and you don't need to reassemble the fingerprint because of it: the antidetect does not spoof the browser version; the profile shows the one that is actually installed.
Not enough space. Profiles take up more than you would think. Count on a few dozen megabytes per profile and look at your free space before the import, not halfway through it.
While you are at it: backups
Everything written above is a ready-made backup routine, except the import goes back to the same computer. Doing an export once a month and putting the file on an external disk costs ten minutes, and saves you on the day the disk does not spin up.
Next: Morfiade features · installation