Every six months I follow the ritual of re-installing or refreshing the Windows operating system on my computer in order to keep it clean and running smoothly. But before I do so, I backup everything useful specially the settings of Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Performing a backup and restore of the Mozilla products’ settings is very easy using the free MozBackup tool, but when it comes to backup of Chrome browser, there is no decent tool available. Sure, you can use the synchronize option to connect Chrome to your Google account and synchronize all the settings, but you may not want to use the sync option for a reason of your own.
Fortunately, it is very easy to backup and restore the Chrome bookmarks. If you want to backup and restore Chrome bookmarks manually, then you can simply follow these instructions:
- Press the hotkey Win+R to open the Run dialog, type %LocalAppData% in the Run dialog and press Enter.
- This will open the local app data folder where Google Chrome settings are stored. You have to open the sub-folder Google\Chrome\UserData\Default in this folder.
- Now you can locate the file Bookmarks in this folder and copy it to some other folder or some other hard disk to backup the Chrome bookmarks.
- When you want to restore the bookmarks at any later time, you can just copy the Bookmarks file back into the folder that you have opened in the step 2 above.
The process is not very different for other operating systems. For example, in Ubuntu Linux you can find the bookmarks file in the ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/ folder. You can also backup the whole Chrome profile folder which would backup all of your Google Chrome settings including the bookmarks, history, cache and more.
Conclusion: It is very easy to backup and restore the bookmarks for the Google Chrome browser manually. You do not need any special tool for it either. All you have to know is where the Google Chrome profile folder is located on your hard disk.