Don't Court Bookmark Disaster

Newcastle Herald

Monday November 22, 1999

YOU may as well face it: life on the Internet has become inextricably tied to the personal list of saved website links that you've spent months and years accumulating.

Internet Explorer calls these saved links `favourites'. Netscape Navigator calls them `bookmarks'.

Your stash of favourite websites has probably become as much a part of your computing life as your word processor.

And yet, what happens if a hard disk crash or other data catastrophe causes you to lose all of your favourite links?

Or what do you do when you sit down at a new computer that you'll be using for some time? If you're like many Internet lovers, you start the arduous task of reassembling your bookmarks, one by one ? if you can remember them.

But there are steps you can take to save your online life by making sure your bookmarks are safe from harm.

Also, with the help of some free tools, you can quickly make any browser your own and perform some time-saving maintenance on your bookmarks or favourites.

First things first, though. You can get some free insurance against countless hours of possible lost time by creating a backup copy of your bookmarks.

Netscape Navigator's bookmark file is called bookmark.htm. It's usually located in the Program Files/Netscape/Navigator folder, which you can get to with the Windows Explorer.

Or, if you can't find it that way, simply select the Windows Start button, then choose Find...Files or Files or Folders. The Find Files dialogue box will open. In the Named field, type `bookmark.htm' (without the quotation marks), and then select the Find Now button.

When the bookmark.htm file appears in the results pane of the Find Files dialogue box, select it, choose Copy from the Edit menu, then paste it onto a floppy disk by opening My Computer, double-clicking on the A drive, and selecting Paste from the Edit menu. Keep the floppy disk in a safe place.

Internet Explorer's favourites are made up of one file for each bookmark, and one folder for each bookmark category. S O backing up the Internet Explorer favourites involves copying the folder and files that make up the bookmarks. On both Windows NT and Windows 95/98, the bookmarks are kept in a folder called `favorites'.

In Windows 95/98, this is a subfolder under the Windows folder; in Windows NT, favourites is under WINNT/Profiles.

Once you find the favourites folder, open it, and select all the files and subfolders that make up Internet Explorer's favourites.

Copy everything to a floppy or to another safe storage device. You can restore the bookmarks you've copied onto a floppy simply by copying everything on the floppy to a new computer.

But what if you want to synchronise your bookmarks or favourites between two computers? For that, your best bet is to turn to a free utility called SyncURLs. You can download it from the ZDNet Software Library at www.hotfiles.com. Simply do a search for SyncURLs once you're at the ZDNet site.

SyncURLs lets you import your bookmarks or favourites into a single bookmark library.

You can then rearrange, edit and finally export the list so that two (or more) browsers contain exactly the same bookmarks. Another handy free utility, Bookm. Search for BookMarx once you arrive at the software library.

You can keep your link collection up-to-date with the shareware program BookMarx. This utility scans all of your bookmarks and notifies you if any links are dead.

Download a trial version from the ZDNet Software Library, at www.zdnet.com/swlib. Search for BookMarx once you arrive at the software library.

Finally, if you have hundreds of bookmarks and need a way to organise them more efficiently, the website MyBookmarks, at www.mybookmarks.com, can help.

MyBookmarks is a free service that stores your existing bookmarks and enables you to sort them alphabetically.

You can do a lot more at the MyBookmarks site, as well, such as use the site as a repository for your favourite links.

That way, no matter where you go or what computer you use, you can retrieve your bookmark list so long as you have a connection to the Internet.