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may cause you some problems (such as upgrading your browser, applying a service pack to Windows, or reinstalling your operating system) or as part of a scheduled backup routine. If, like me, you add new bookmarks to your collection almost every day, true diligence would be required to also keep an up to date backup!

Step 2: True Disaster recovery and Sharing your bookmarks for the mobile user

So, for true "disaster recovery" of your bookmarks you need to consider an automated methodology that will save your bookmarks for you on a regular basis. To ensure that you are protected from hard drive or other hardware failure, this automated method should also move your backup "offsite" - either onto a backup media or, even better, to an online source that you can access from another machine.

As we are focusing on protecting your bookmarks, we'll ignore automated backup facilities that could protect your bookmarks as well as other files and focus purely on protecting bookmarks themselves.

It is here that your options differ depending upon the browser that you are using.

For Internet Explorer users, the best option is to sign up for an online service such as Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, or del.icio.us. All of these services allow you to "bookmark" from your browser but store the bookmark data on their own central servers. Google Bookmarks and Yahoo! Bookmarks can be embedded directly into Internet Explorer by installing the Google or Yahoo! toolbar as appropriate. del.icio.us also provides facilities for Internet Explorer to allow you to easily bookmark (or "tag" in del.icio.us speak) new pages and access your online bookmarks. At the time of writing, these facilities are slightly more cumbersome than those for Google or Yahoo! however, that provide an actual drop down menu, similar to the normal bookmarks menu for your online bookmarks.

Firefox users can also use del.icio.us, Google bookmarks, or Yahoo! bookmarks. In addition to these facilities, Firefox users should also consider the popular Bookmark Synchroniser and FoxMarks Firefox extensions.

Bookmark Synchroniser is an extension that allows you to upload a backup of your bookmarks (in XBEL format) to an FTP site. It can also be configured to automatically download the bookmark file when you start Firefox, enabling you to keep your bookmarks in sync across multiple PCs in the same way as Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, or del.icio.us, without the reliance on a third party service (assuming you have your own

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