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HOWTO: backup your Firefox bookmarks

2007-03-11 5:36 pm 5 Comments

I spent 10 minutes looking for an extension to do this, then found that its, smartly, built into Firefox's bookmark manager.  I'm not sure what this mindset is called, Extension Dependance?  Anyway, if you need to move bookmarks from one machine to the other in Firefox:

  1. From the Bookmarks menu, select Organize Bookmarks.
  2. Choose Export... in the File menu and save your file.
  3. On the target machine, after selecting Organize Bookmarks, select Import... and choose the file you created in step 2.

If you work on multiple PC's, there are also a number of extensions that will synchronize bookmarks between them using a 3rd party service or your own FTP server like Foxmarks or Google Bookmarks.

Jason Lefkowitz

Pro Tip: your bookmarks are stored as a plain old HTML file in your profile directory. So to back
them up, just copy [Your Profile Path]/bookmarks.html to another location, and you're all set.
To restore, overwrite the "live" bookmarks.html with the backup. This won't work for
too much longer -- the bookmarks-as-HTML-file format goes back to Netscape 0.x days, and is due to
be replaced by a SQLite database for Firefox 3.0 -- but for now, it should do ya fine.

2007-03-11 6:26 pm

Oscar

Jason, I think the 3 steps above are easier for your average user than trying to find your Profile
directory for firefox. Just sayin'

2007-03-11 8:01 pm

jo

Or for those of us who have become completely GNOMEified (muaha), and are using Epiphany as our
main browser these days: 1) Click "Bookmarks" on the navigation menu 2) Select
"File" -> "Export Bookmarks" 3) Choose your preferred format for the export
and off you go

2007-03-12 8:14 am

Jason Lefkowitz

Jason, I think the 3 steps above are easier for your average user than trying to find
your Profile directory for firefox. Just sayin'


Oh, I agree; that's why I called it a "Pro Tip" ;-) Windows users who want nice
GUI-fied backup of not just bookmarks but extensions, filled out forms, etc etc etc should check
out MozBackup. No idea if there are similar Linux
& Mac utilities available; but I expect your average Linux user to be able to tar up a
directory on their own ;-)

2007-03-19 9:03 am

zenwalker

wow...thanx...
nice artikel..it's save me...huehehehe

2008-06-04 7:26 pm