How to sync bookmarks between flash drive and browser?

December 28, 2010 4:32 PM

I want to save my bookmarks on a flash drive, and then sync them with anything I happen to bookmark in my browser throughout the day. Is this possible?

Given the del.icio.us closing scare, I've decided I should keep my data locally, using the cloud as a backup.

To that end, I'd like to have my bookmarks on a flash drive that I could plug into whatever computer I'm on, and then sync new bookmarks with those on my flash drive at the end of each day.

I'm not inclined to programming, so I don't know that I could use any advanced scripts or something. Any programs that would make this process easy are what I'm looking for. Also, I'm not sure if there's a program I would use on my flash drive to store the bookmarks.

Any suggestions are much appreciated. Thanks!

posted by reenum to computers & internet (11 answers total)

You could run your entire browser from a flash drive, and carry it around with you. Look up "firefox portable"
posted by Leon at 4:36 PM on December 28, 2010

Also, my work computer is a PC and my home computer is a Mac.
posted by reenum at 4:37 PM on December 28, 2010

Given the del.icio.us closing scare

None of these services will close up overnight. So there isn't much need for such panic. Just continue using delicious till they announce what will happen next. Yahoo! will most likely sell it to someone else. Even if they shut it down outright, there will be plenty of time for you to retrieve your bookmarks.

Many of us have switched to pinboard. It can easily import your delicious bookmarks but it costs ~$8.

If you store everything on a flash drive, what happens if you accidentally lose it? If you go that route, why not store it in your Dropbox folder?

Look up "firefox portable"

There is no Firefox portable for osx.
posted by special-k at 4:55 PM on December 28, 2010

If you're using firefox you can use "firefox sync" for the cloud and the FEBE extension for local backups.
posted by pyro979 at 5:04 PM on December 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

I use google chrome on two different computers and use Google Chrome Options>Personal Stuff> Sync to sync my bookmarks on both computers. I have two PCs, but it looks like there is also Google Chrome for Mac and I would imagine that you could set up things similarly and avoid a flash drive altogether.
posted by scrambles at 5:05 PM on December 28, 2010

Chrome not only syncs bookmarks across different machines, it also saves them in Google Docs.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:31 PM on December 28, 2010

I use a Mac at home and Linux at work, and Google Chrome Sync works perfectly between them. All my bookmarks, etc, are on each computer, plus the cloud (eg, Google's servers.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:42 PM on December 28, 2010

I use mozilla sync to a personal server backed by sqlite. Before that, I looked into a tool called unison to sync files like that.
posted by pwnguin at 5:48 PM on December 28, 2010

You don't need any fancy sync tools. You can do this with what's built into Firefox.

At the end of each browsing session, go to Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks->Export HTML and save all your existing bookmarks to bookmarks.html on your flash drive.

When browsing on a different computer, go to Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks->Import HTML and pull in the file from your flash drive. Those bookmarks will be merged with the ones already in the browser.

If you're unfortunate enough not to be using Firefox at some point, you can simply browse to file:///path/to/bookmarks.html using any browser to see a nicely formatted web page made from all your exported bookmarks.
posted by flabdablet at 7:03 PM on December 28, 2010

pyro979: "the FEBE extension"

There's a new extension syncer called Siphon that works better on my computer than FEBE.
posted by IndigoRain at 9:10 PM on December 28, 2010

Xmarks stores them, syncs them and backs them up.
And use pinboard too as others have said.
posted by episodic at 2:19 AM on December 29, 2010