Back Up Your Bookmarks Online

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The explosive growth of social bookmarking sites like Delicious (formerly del.icio.us), ma.gnolia and others have proved there are legions of us who want to share our favorite sites with each other and the world.

Then there are others who don't necessarily want to share everything with everyone, but still want to backup their bookmarks online so it is accessible everywhere.

Even if you're happily sharing away on delicious, there may still be some bookmarks you don't want to share -- site admin links, banking sites, and, uh, "other" sites. Ahem...

If you've been looking for a way to backup your bookmarks online, but keep them private at the same time, grab yourself some coffee as we explore your options.

Social Bookmarking

Just because Delicious makes it easy to share your bookmarks doesn't mean you have to. You could, in fact, keep your entire Delicious account (or ma.gnolia or most other bookmarking sites) private.

Just make sure that each time you bookmark a page you mark it private. If you're using Firefox with the delicious add-on, this would be our recommendation. this way when you mark a private bookmark, you get a local copy of your bookmarks, a private online backup and use the Firefox add-on to keep the two in sync with ease.

Mark "do not share" to make your Del.icio.us bookmark private. Photo courtesy Delicious' website

Of course, you'll have to remember to mark your bookmarks private each time you add one. If it sounds like something you'd eventually mess up, then keep reading for some more solutions.

Go Old School

It may sound primitive, but you can still export a simple HTML bookmark list straight from the browser and upload the file to your own private server or backup hard drive.

In Firefox, you would select Organize Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu. From the star shaped button, you can either Backup your bookmarks (from Firefox 3) or Export HTML... to your desktop.

Exporting bookmarks into an HTML file in Firefox 3

If you decide to upload it to an Apache web server, you can use an .htaccess file to require a login before the page is displayed. .htaccess isn't totally secure, but it will stop most prying eyes.

To create a .htaccess file for password protection, create a text file named ".htaccess" in the directory where the bookmarks backup file is located and paste these lines as content:

AuthName "Password Protect Directory"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/username/.htpasswd
<Limit GET POST PUT>
Require valid-user
</Limit>

Now change the AuthUserFile path to a directory on your server that is not accessible for the web, and create the .htpasswd file. The username/password combo in .htpasswd takes this form:

username:encryptedpassword

To get an encrypted version of your desired password, just use one of the many free generators available like the one from htmlite

You can also generate the .htpasswd file from the shell like so:

htpasswd -c /path/to/the/folder/.htpasswd your_username

Now if you try to access your bookmarks file, the browser should prompt you for a username and password.

Use Foxmarks Firefox Plug-in

If you use Firefox, check out the Firefox plug-in Foxmarks. Foxmarks allows you to save a backup bookmark file directly to a server without manually exporting and uploading via FTP or scp.

Just plug your server settings into Foxmarks and it will take care of the rest. Foxmarks works over FTP or WebDAV. See the Foxmarks Wiki for more details.

Evernote, Favoritus.com and Box.net

If you don't have your own server to store backups of your bookmarks, checkout some of the many free services that can do it for you: box.net, PutPlace, Favoritus.com and Mozy are just a few.

None of these services are specifically geared to backing up bookmarks, but all of them offer online storage (generally around 2-5 gigs for free) and often provide FTP access (which would work with Foxmarks).

Another possibility is Evernote, a backup solution that's one part web-app, one part desktop application and one part mobile app. Like the social bookmarking services, Evernote has excellent privacy controls so if you want to share something you can; if you don't you can keep it private.

As an added advantage Evernote can take just about anything as input -- not just bookmarks. For example, images, webpages, movies and more can be stored alongside your bookmarks.

In Favoritus users can save their favorites links and associate it with own made icons, it made Favoritus a good option for initial page.

Google browser sync

The most advanced bookmark backup, sharing and sync utility ever was the Google browser sync. Bookmark syncing enabled one to upload and synchronize bookmarks between any number of browsers. This is now defunct since Firefox 3.0. We are looking for the new open source developers to take over where Google left off and continue this great service.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways you can have your cake and keep a private online backup as well. Which method works best for you depends on your work habits and how organized you are. It might take some experimenting to find a system that works best for you.

• This page was last modified 19:19, 5 May 2009.