An Easier Way to Back Up Firefox Bookmarks

Subscriber Janusz Lukasiak wrote to remind me that there is an easier way to back up Firefox bookmarks

Your advice given in Newsletter 38SE is of course correct, but it requires, among others, making hidden file visible. In my experience, this is a bit confusing for some folks – I mean not so much the ‘unhide’ procedure, but the suddent appearance of so many ‘new’ folders and files, including a temptation to mess with them, usually with disastrous consequences

Would it be advisable to give another, IMHO safer, tip in addition to the one
in the Newsletter? In FF, click Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks and then in the
‘Bookmarks Manager’ window click File -> Export.
This creates a .html/.htm file with the bookmarks in the place, and with the
name, of your choice.

Kind regards, and many thanks for the newsletter.
Janusz Lukasiak

Thanks, Janusz. That’s a very good point, and it’s probablly a much better way for most users.

I’ve been backing up bookmarks so long the hard way — the way that actually works all the time — that I hadn’t really tried Export in a long time. Also, since I back up all my data files every night using Karen’s Replicator, _my_ real backup process lets me simply copy & paste a file into a new program installation — and I’m finished.

I stopped using the “Export” functions during the early versions of Netscape, Opera and IE because the function was pretty useless. Of course, I was trying to import the bookmarks into a different web browser — and then, the other browser often would not import them.

Since Janusz reminded me, I rewrote the page Backing Up Your Firefox Bookmarks to focus on the Export method, with “the hard way” as an alternative method.