Your First Bookmarks

Create An Account

It may seem odd to have an account on a single-user system, but the reason is simple. No-one else should be able to see your private bookmarks, add new ones, or edit or delete to the ones you have.

If you never expose your Backup Brain to the internet this won’t matter. Personally I’ve found a lot of value in being able to share lists of relevant bookmarks with friends and coworkers. I hope you will too.

See Setting Up Remote Access for instructions on how to share your Backup Brain with the internet.

Manually Adding a Bookmark

Via the site

  1. Click the “Add a Bookmark” link in the right navigation bar.
  2. Fill in the form.
  3. Click “Create Bookmark”

That’s it. A process will be kicked off in the background to generate an archive. This usually takes a couple seconds.

Via a Bookmarklet or Browser Extension

See Helpers for details.

Importing Bookmarks

Backup Brain support importing bookmarks in the common HTML format that your browser & most bookmark managers will export. It can also import Pinboard.in’s custom JSON export if you’re migrating from there.

Export a file containing the bookmarks you want to import (see below). Then go to your Backup Brain, and click on the “Import Bookmarks link in the right sidebar. Follow the instructions for uploading your file. If you want, you can optionally specify some tags (space separated) that can added to every bookmark in the import.

Notes & Limitations

  • Firefox supports tags with spaces in them. Backup Brain does not. Something tagged with “foo bar” will be converted to a “foo_bar” tag.
  • Tags will be converted to lower case. “FoO” becomes “foo”
  • If there is already a bookmark in Backup Brain whose URL matches one in the imported file, that imported record will be skipped.
  • When specifying tags in the UI those tags will added to the existing tags (if any) of every bookmark in the import.
  • The importer will attempt to create archives of all the imported URLs after the import is complete. The more bookmarks you’re importing, the longer it will take to archive everything.
  • Bookmarks for pages that no longer exist will be skipped. It’s pretty common to have old bookmarks for pages that no longer exist. 😉

Exporting Bookmarks from Chrome

  1. Choose “Bookmark Manager” from the “Bookmarks” menu.
  2. Click the three dots in the upper right corner, and choose “Export Bookmarks”

Exporting Bookmarks from Firefox

  1. Choose “Manage Bookmarks” from the “Bookmarks” menu.
  2. Click the icon that has an up arrow and a down arrow and choose “Export Bookmarks to HTML”

Exporting Bookmarks from Pinboard

  1. Log in to your Pinboard.in account
  2. Click “settings”
  3. Click “backup”
  4. Click “JSON”

Troubleshooting

See the Troubleshooting page for any problems you may be having creating bookmarks.
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