How to Backup and Save Your Delicious Bookmarks?

One of my favorite bookmarking service, Delicous, is shutting down thanks to Yahoo neglecting it and finally ditching it.

We had a bit of a good news with Xmarks staying alive but Delicious is going away. I have a ton of bookmarks saved for a few years in delicious and started looking around for ways to save them.

Here are a few ways to backup and also a few alternatives.

How to backup Delicious bookmarks?

1. Login to your delicious account
2. Go to Settings –> Bookmarks –> Export/Backup Bookmarks
3. Check ‘include my tags’ and ‘include my notes’ and click ‘Export’.

Save your delicious bookmarks as a HTM file. You can rename the extension to .HTML so it is compatible for import into browsers.

Export Delicious to your browser

You can export the Delicious bookmarks to your browser but unfortunately they arrive without tags. This could be a deal breaker as that is one of my key ways of organizing bookmarks in delicious.

In Firefox, you can just go to

Bookmarks –> Organize bookmarks –> Import and Backup –> Import HTML

If you have Xmarks or Firefox Sync, you can use one of those sync services to keep your bookmarks synced across your browsers.

In Google Chrome, go to

Bookmark manager –> Organize –> Import bookmarks

You can choose in Chrome settings to sync your bookmarks to Google.

Both these solutions aren’t pretty if you have thousands of bookmarks like me tagged nicely in delicious. So, I am in search of other alternatives to Delicious but haven’t decided on one. I will share them here to get some ideas from you as well.

Delicious Alternatives

Diigo – This is a service that offers bookmarks as one of its features in addition to note taking, web reasearch, etc. Plus, Diigo is not free. You can see the comparison here. How-to guide.

Evernote – The popular note taking web app can import your delicious bookmarks but with no love for tags.

Spabba.com – A quick service put together by Blippy co-founder. Quick as in built-in 30 minutes However, the service is supposed to work only with old-ish accounts that were created before yahoo merged. Also, they seem to be hitting an API limit with a ‘fail fish’ error. Might have to try again later.

Pinboard.in – A paid barebones bookmarking service whose price goes up as more members join. Here is a list of features roadmap for this budding service.

Mister Wong – I have reviewed this service a long time back. Maybe it’s time to take another look.

Historio.us – A simple service like Pinboard but it also lets you search for any word on the pages you have bookmarked!

Faviki – Another cool bookmarking service that applies the concepts of Wikipedia to tags.

Also, here is an interesting read – Delicious’s Data Policy is Like Setting a Museum on Fire.

It is pretty sad to see one of the first services that got ‘web 2.0’ is going away. But, I see this as a wonderful opportunities for other startups to fill in this void. Who knows, we might end up getting something way better than Delicious.

What do you think?

{credit to some sources here – TNW }