Bookmarks and Back Up

Anyone who surfs the web realizes how important bookmarks (or favorites in IE terms) are, in saving her time and energy.

They free you from having to type the full address (instead just a click is all what you need) and they free you from having to remember the address or even the title of the site and they help you make sense of themselves by giving you a way to organize them. In Firefox particularly, you can remember the bookmarks by their keywords; for instance, you can just type gm for Gmail.

When something becomes essential in your life, you become afraid of losing them and find ways to keep them in safe places. There are many services that want to help you do that: Google Bookmark, Delicious, Foxmarks are very good sites to keep them so that they are accessible anywhere anytime.

For a regular Firefox user, Delicious doesn't help much; you can't have an easy and fast way to access your bookmarks. Google Bookmarks lacks a good organization scheme: you give two labels to a bookmark and it appears in two places, and there is completely no hierarchical ordering at all (a byproduct of Google's sacred Label system which, while many people dislike it, Google still insists on using).

Foxmarks is a good tool for a Firefox user. It synchronizes the local bookmarks with a server, so all your bookmarks are available at the Firefox Bookmark toolbar and also online on the web (www.foxmarks.com).

I made a mistake by trusting one service (Foxmarks) completely. My Firefox crashed once and due to some reason I don't know, all local bookmarks are gone and Foxmarks intelligently synced its server with my empty list of bookmarks. (I was wondering why it was not the other way or why it didn't ask me at all.) As a result, I have lost all the bookmarks that I have painstakingly collected over the years.

I rebuilt my bookmarks as far as I can recall from my memory and redid the keywords for my Firefox. Now I reinstalled my Windows and before wiping out my old Windows, I made sure the bookmarks were synced with the server. When I got to the new Windows and tried to download the bookmarks back to my local store, I was greeted with an error and when I visited the website, it showed me this:


I was so disappointed with a service that I trusted for so long, yet I have no other better service to resort to.

A question I am now asking myself: should I rebuilt the bookmarks and backup them from Firefox to a file and keep it on my HDD? I can occasionally upload the backed up file to my server so that I have a more recent copy in case I lost the file on my computer. I would have a better control over my bookmarks and how often they are backed up at the expense of extra time and effort. But, now it seems these extra effort and time are worth the while and it may probably lead me to a habit of backing up my files more frequently or even to doing RAID 1 (mirroring) for my data disks.

Have I been so naive and lazy to have trusted an automated service (that has no guarantee that it will work when I need it most)? Have I been forgetting the old good way of doing the backup myself and taking control of the entire process myself (of course with extra effort and time)?

Anyway, having lost my entire bookmark collection and now being cut off from the newly created bookmarks for many hours have taught me a good lesson on Back Up. I'd rather not trust fully those online services that "assure" me an ease of mind by helping me back up my stuffs. I will most likely continue to use them as usual but I will from now on start a habit of having a back up copy myself that I can see and reach at very easily.

If you have a good suggestion on Firefox bookmarks synchronization, please let me know and I will be very grateful.

Technorati Tag: Bookmarks