[Solved] Chromium snap: profile migrated manually, now I'm confused about its location(s)

snap
1

Kubuntu 19.04

-My goal: what is a non-changing path of my Chromium snap user profile? (for my rsync backup script.)

-What I did: 2019-11-01 manual copy of my profile as instructed in osomon post. :warning:[edit: these steps are obsolete, see later replies.] from .bash_history:

sudo snap install chromium
mkdir -p ~/snap/chromium/current/.config
cp -R ~/.config/chromium ~/snap/chromium/current/.config/

How things are now: $HOME/snap/chromium:

drwxr-xr-x 5 ... Nov  1 10:02 920/
drwxr-xr-x 5 ... Nov  8 07:18 937/
drwxr-xr-x 3 ... Nov  1 10:02 common/
drwxrwxr-x 3 ... Nov  1 09:57 current/

The ‘937’ revision dir reflects my recent usage (e.g. my bookmarks file), the ‘current’ dir does not (frozen in time at presumably copy command timestamp).

-What I’m confused about: An osomon post via web searching says ‘current’ is a symbolic link:

“'current’ is a symbolic link to the current revision of the snap that is installed”

but it’s not in my case (‘d’ not ‘l’).

I assume that if ‘current’ were a s-link to my active profile and adjusted automatically by the snap service then that would be the solution to my goal since 937 will eventually increment.

What should I do? Thanks for any help.

2

You should remove current folder and replace it with symlink to 937 named current. I guess snapd can’t make the symlink themselves after you created folder with this name manually before.

Chromium snap would automatically import your config from ~/.config/chromium on first run so your action was unnecessary and lead to trouble.

3

These instructions are outdated (and partially incorrect indeed). The chromium snap will now find an existing profile in ~/.config/chromium, and will copy it over to ~/snap/chromium/current/.config on first run, if no profile exists.
So I suggest deleting ~/snap/chromium/* and then running chromium again.

Your backup script should copy the contents of the destination of the current symlink in ~/snap/chromium.

4

Success! :white_check_mark: Thanks for the fix. Solution for future web searchers: as per oSoMoN advice: -Copy ‘937’ dir (this is my current profile holder) somewhere as a temp backup, if you wish. -Reverse my original copy step:

mkdir ~/.config/chromium  (I had removed earlier)
cp -iR ~/snap/chromium/937/.config/chromium/*  ~/.config/chromium/
rm -IR ~/snap/chromium/*

Start chromium snap (it will copy your profile silently). Verify results:

ls -l ~/snap/chromium/
drwxr-xr-x .. 937
drwxr-xr-x .. common
lrwxrwxrwx .. current -> 937

‘current’ is now a s-link to my active profile. ‘~/.config/chromium’ is now unnecessary, remove if you wish.