I have built up a long list of carefully organised bookmarks in Firefox and Internet Explorer. In terms of sheer time and effort, this is now one of the most valuable bits of data on my computer. How can I back it up? Paul Sofer
The simplest way to back up bookmarks is to export them to a file held in web format (html) on your hard drive, which you can then copy to external storage. In Internet Explorer, go to File, choose Import and Export, then follow directions to create a file called bookmark.htm (unless you change the name). In Firefox, go to the Bookmark Manager, click the file tab and select Export to create a file called bookmarks.html. If you double-click either file it will load into your browser and provide a set of clickable links. You could set the bookmark file as your home page to get fast access to your links.
An alternative for large numbers of bookmarks is to use a separate bookmark manager to collect, sort and test links. There used to be a lot of these, and you could pick one from Fileheap.com. Most are not free, but you could try dotBookmark. Today, it's more common to use an online bookmark site so that you can access your links from any PC. The old faithfuls include Backflip and LinkaGoGo. However, the Delicious social bookmarking service is probably now the leading example (http://del.icio.us/), and Furl is also worth a look. I find them a bit tedious for everyday use, but they're fantastic when you're stuck in some out-of-the way office or cybercafe.
Backchat: Richard Hancock says: "I simply include my Favorites folder as part of my normal weekly backup of essential data to CD-RW." There's a separate link file on your hard drive for each IE bookmark. You can find them by running Windows Explorer, selecting C:, pressing F3 and searching for Favorites; you will usually want the folder that has a star icon. This does not, of course, back up Firefox bookmarks.
Mark Riley and Roberto Tavoni recommend Foxmarks, a Firefox add-on. Mark says: "When I bookmark a site, the plugin stores the change on a Foxmarks server and synchronises with my other computers the next time I switch them on."
