Sometimes it’s necessary to copy all your MetaTrader chart settings to another PC or save them while you are reinstalling Windows on your current PC, or in case you are moving to a new broker and have to download their platform. If you keep only one or two charts open — that’s not a problem, but if you keep more than 10 open charts and each of them employs some custom settings it’s a real pain to set up them on a new platform manually. It’s easy to avoid doing such work by using the Profiles feature in MetaTrader platform. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to move all your chart settings from one platform to another:
1. Save all your current charts in your current platform to a new profile:
2. Give this profile some distinctive name:
3. It’s now available as a separate folder in your MetaTrader’s directory in the «profiles» folder. You can copy it and then paste into the same «profiles» folder in the new platform’s directory (on your new PC or in your new broker’s platform):
4. Finally, load a new profile by selecting it in the Profiles menu in your new platform:
That’s it. Nothing difficult or time-consuming. If you have any questions or comments regarding the process of moving the chart settings in MetaTrader, please, feel free to reply below.
July 24th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Thanks for the useful tip, I think many people can use this. It is always a pain to setup all of the charts when you change brokers and have to reinstall MT4.
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August 8th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
I don’t see my profile under the MT4 profile directory? can you please advise.
Thanks!
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Andrei Reply:
August 8th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
How do you check that?
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August 11th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
I want to copy the profiles from my usual to a new MT4 account but although thet are all listed in the existing MT4 platform they are not shown in the “Profiles” folder. The files must exist somewhere, but I can’t find them. Any suggestions?
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Andrei Reply:
August 11th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
1. There should be profile folders, not files, inside the “profiles” folder of your MT4.
2. Are you sure that you look in the “profiles” folder of your old MT4 installation, which already has some profiles? If you have several installations of MT4 it’s quite easy to confuse them.
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August 11th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
After more research, have found that this seems to be a Vista issue that does not let read/write files to be stored in the ProgramFiles folder. Instead they are stored separately in \AppData\local\VirtualStore! This applies to Profiles, Templates, etc
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Andrei Reply:
August 11th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Wow! I didn’t know that Vista could mess with user’s files to such extent. Thanks for telling us that you’ve finally managed to find the profiles.
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August 11th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Tha annoying thing is that these ‘virtual’ files are invisible in the search procedure!
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October 30th, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Thank you so much, been searching for those files forever!!!
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admin Reply:
October 30th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
No problem. I’m glad to be helpful to fellow traders.
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February 14th, 2012 at 10:05 pm
any idea where the files are stored on windows 7? i can’t find them anywhere.
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admin Reply:
February 14th, 2012 at 10:48 pm
In respective AppData folder.
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February 17th, 2012 at 6:14 pm
For Windows 7, which has different levels of security and users (Administrator, John (or your name), etc., the problem is that if you don’t open your MT4 platform as Administrator (right click, select ‘run as administrator’, everything that personilizes your setups is stored somewhere under your user name which isn’t obvious to find. Mine was under john\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files(x86)\yourForexBrokerRootFolder (FXCM, eToro, etc).
The way I did it was to copy my “yourForexBrokerRootFolder” from c:\Program Files (x86) to the next computer, then take the files from the folders in VirtualStore above and copy them into their respective c:\Program Files (x86)\yourForexBrokerRootFolder folders, one folder at a time, each file under each folder, replacing files already there if it seemed logical. I then started my MT4 on the next computer as Administrator, chose the Profile that I was using on the original computer, and everything worked on the next computer as it did on the original computer.
This has been bugging me for quite a while, and I’ve never found an explanation that was as ‘plug and play’ as I described above.
Good Luck!
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admin Reply:
February 17th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Thanks for sharing! Yes, on Windows 7, personal files are stored quite differently.
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May 8th, 2012 at 10:25 pm
this is how i found it in Windows 7:
1. click the windows ball bottom left
2. type %appdata% in search box
3. up popped the folder appdata\roaming
4. go up to the top and you will see this path….now click the word appdata and it will show all folders under appdata
5. then i opened the local folder
6. in the local folder is the virtualstore folder
7. in the virtualstore folder is the programfiles folder and BINGO….all the mt4 folders!
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admin Reply:
May 9th, 2012 at 6:48 am
Thank you for sharing!
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