Backing up Bookmarks

[The Judge]

We regularly have threads about the importance of routinely backing up our work, and although I'm not perhaps always as assiduous as I could be, I've got all the major stuff saved.

However, I'd forgotten about my bookmarks. When I'm researching anything important or in depth, I usually write things down in a notebook with details of the source material, whether a book (name and author) or website (www address), or I copy articles/pictures across to a folder and again make a note of the source. But sometimes if I've been rushing with my internet researching, or I'm just in a sloppy-can't-be-bothered-to-reach-for-the-notebook mood, I've just bookmarked the relevant page so I can access it again as and when needed. Guess what got lost when my laptop's hard disk went into cardiac arrest this week.

Fortunately, we hadn't thrown away an old laptop, and that had some bookmarks on it. The Judicial Helpmeet (whose techno-know-how far surpasses mine) was able to copy those across via an online account with Mozilla Firefox** -- but that listing is two years out of date.

It's not the end of the world, and it may be I will never need to check out the missing sources again, or if I do, I can find them as easily as before. The one big annoyance was I'd found a new and better online dictionary, and googling "free online dictionary" didn't immediately bring it up, but luckily I'd linked to it once here on Chrons, so I was able to find it that way. I thought I'd mention the issue here, though, in case my bookmarking neglect helps prevent someone else making a bigger mistake. (And to get plenty of sympathy, of course... )



** precise details available if anyone is interested. Apparently, now I've got this online thingummy the bookmarks list will automatically update every time I add to it, so in the event of a future breakdown I can access the up-to-date list.

 

[Mouse]

I delete mine after a while anyway, otherwise they confuse me! I've deleted most of the ones I had for TBM research, but kept a couple about arrests and murder-investigation-procedure cos that might come in handy again, but most other stuff has been deleted and replaced with agent bookmarks.

 

[Abernovo]

Aargh! Computer death! I sympathise. Chocolate hob-nobs?

I use Chrome at the minute, which stores the bookmarks in the cloud, allowing me to access them from any device with Chrome, once I log in. I hate Internet Explorer, but it does have one advantage of being part of Windows: it stores the Favourites on the computer, so when you do your standard save to an external HD, they get copied*.

I wish other browsers did similar sometimes. Perhaps fire up IE and import links once in a while? For important links I often save anyway in a folder for links. For single pages that I think are really important, but can't be bothered cluttering up my links for, I have been known to save as a whole webpage. That way I can look at them when I'm offline, too, and delete when I no longer want them.

*Yes, I do a complete hard drive back up (it only adds new files) at least once a fortnight.

 

[Boneman]

Paranoiacally, I always print a hard copy of those - I once lost all my 'favourites' in a crash, those places where I thought 'oh, I can go here when I need the minutiae* of research, I needn't pay too much attention right now'. And if there's a fire or a flood in my house, I'm cooked. Or drowned. But the files are piling up...

(*out of interest: is that pronounced 'my newt ee eye' or 'my new shee eye'?)

 

[The Judge]

Chocolate hob-nobs very acceptable, thank you, Aber! That Chrome store sounds like the Mozilla thing I've got now, but keeping a separate folder or webpage may be an even better idea. And printing everything out has its own attraction, too -- except we're drowning in paperwork, anyway.


BM -- I always pronounce it min-oo-shee-eye. *wonders how many variants we can come up with*

 

[Ursa major]

Commiserations, TJ.



(Doesn't either the NSA or GCHQ (or both**) have a copy of the supposedly lost metadata? )





** - Not to mention Huawei, the FSB, Mossad, Chinese intelligence, Google, any number of other intelligence agencies....

 

[J Riff]

I remember this happening, and learnt find the little .txt file in the Explorer folder and bakitup. Funny though, last week my laptop kakked and gosh I had forgotten to back up the !$141# bookmarks. Life goes on, sort of.

 

[sknox]

What, does no one here use XMarks?

I would never depend on a manual backup, for the simple reason that I'm too unreliable. With XMarks (there are alternatives), not only are the bookmarks backed up to the cloud, they're also synced to whatever computer I'm using. I never have to give it a second thought.

Needless to say, it's for Firefox.

 

[mithril]

Another vote for using signed in chrome. The bookmarks get tied in to your google account somehow I assume... So it works for me.

 

[Nik]

Now you mention it, I *don't know* if my new 3TB Seagate NAS drive's 'Memeo instant backup' backs up my 'favourites'.

Sadly, I lost all my previous favourites when a RAM strip went bad in this PC at the same time as the hard-drive began to die.

I managed to salvage my tales and down-loads using a USB adaptor after the PC was repaired and a new drive installed, but I lost the hierarchy of favourites...

 

[jastius]

when I do any research for anything, or am working on an article or story I put the whole mess in a new folder and have a page in there where I copy and clip every page address I go to as well as the pages of listed search findings I get from the browser. this is because oftentimes I type the same things in the browser and because of the vagaries of the marketing system or the current state of corporate google bribes I get different results. so I start a bibliography file at the outset. this way I can copy any page addresses into the search bar if I need them again. then these files are saved with the rest of my files to a separate external hard drive during the maintenance sweeps. so my delightful little 1 tg hard drive no bigger then a gum packet has my whole OS and back-up in it.