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If your chosen search engine is your map of the Internet, complete with areas marked "here be dragons", then your bookmarks (or "Favourites") are your carefully placed map pins on that ever changing map. Lose them, and may have lost the information that they point to indefinitely. If, like me, you have several hundred bookmarks covering a diverse range of topics, you may never find all of that information again.

Backing up your bookmarks and favourites should be part of your "disaster recovery" scenario irrespective of whether you are a casual Internet user, consider yourself a "power user", or like me, you are someone for whom hitting the Internet day-in-day-out is part of your job. Nobody likes the guy who doesn't get his work done because he can't find the office anymore!

In this article I will explain the basic of backing up your bookmarks in Internet Explorer and Firefox, show you some steps that you should take to ensure your backup is actually useful, and discuss some of the tools that you can use to go beyond simply protecting your bookmarks and start utilising them in ways that you may never have seen before.

Step 1: The Basic How-To of Backing up Bookmarks

Internet Explorer stores your bookmarks as a series of .url files in the "Favourites" sub-folder of the "My Documents" folder. Backing these up is therefore a simple matter of copying the complete contents of the MyDocuments\Favourites folder to a CD, DVD, USB key, or other external media. The bookmarks will actually remain perfectly usable in this state, explorable as a set of files and accessible directly in Internet Explorer if you double click on the file itself.

To restore your backed up bookmarks, simply copy the backed up files into the MyDocuments\Favourites folder.

FireFox, by comparison, as a specialised Import/Export facility built into its Bookmark Organiser. To access this facility, click "Bookmarks -> Organise Bookmarks" in Firefox. When the Bookmark Manager appears, click "File->Export" to export your bookmarks to a flat HTML file. This file can be imported back into Firefox using the "File->Import" option in Bookmarks Manager, and can also be browsed as a normal HTML file. Viewing the file in this way will show all of your bookmarks as links in a structured HTML page, all of which can be clicked to follow the link through to the bookmarked site or page.

As both of these processes are manual, they are only really suitable for use before you undertake a piece of work on your

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