Tag: backup

How to backup your Delicious bookmarks and import to Diigo

According to an article on The Next Web, Yahoo might be looking at closing down or possibly transform the social bookmarking service Delicious into some other Yahoo branded product. If you are like me, and have half your online memory archived on Delicious (I have more than 3,000 bookmarks), the thought of losing all those links is not all that attractive. But fear not, it is easy to do a backup and also to import the data into other services.

delicious logo

Backup your Delicious bookmarks
To backup your bookmarks, first log in to your account at Delicious.com. Then go Settings and then Export/Backup Bookmarks.  There you can save all your bookmarks as an html file and by clicking the boxes for “include my tags” and “include my notes” you also will save that data. Press “Export” and save the html file to your computer.

Import to Diigo
If you don’t have an account, first join Diigo for free by selecting a username and password. Then (after activating your account via email confirmation) you got to Tools and Import Bookmarks. There, press the icon for Delicious and on the next page you will have two options. Either you select the html file on your computer, that you just saved from Delicious, or you import via API by filling in your Delicious username and password. (I actually did both by mistake, but luckily it didn’t import twice.)

If you have many bookmarks, the import to Diigo will take several hours, but it worked really well. The only thing that I have noticed so far that didn’t work, is that the bookmarks marked “private” in Delicious are not private in Diigo after the import and you will have to change that manually, which of course most people won’t do.

Also, the old tags are imported, but you can’t filter via old tags in the Library, unless you search for it. However, if you add a new item to Diigo with a new tag, it automatically finds your old stuff from Delicious with the same tag.

There are other ways to import your old Delicious bookmarks to other services or browsers, but with Diigo at least now you have a backup plan in case Delicious will disappear.

Pownce closes – should I backup my social networks?

The crew behind the microblogging site Pownce today announced that they will close the service on Dec 15 and instead join Six Apart. Apparently they are planning to come up with something new and better next year. This raises a lot of questions, for example, what do you do with your content when the site you are using can be gone the next day? With the abundance of social media sites out there, it is inevitable that some will disappear in the near future.

Now, I never really used Pownce on a regular basis, so I don’t care about those messages that I posted. But had it been for example Twitter, I would definitely have to think through if I should do a backup of my messages and all my contacts. I can especially see great value in saving the friends that you are connected to if you wanted to transfer your network to some other place, even if you had to look up people manually.

Pownce have come up with one solution to this problem.

“We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.”

That is a great service, but I think it would be even more valuable if you could export information about your entire network. Fot most of the social networking services I use, the real value is not in the content but in the network.

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