Guides

Where is my bookmarks file?

Every browser keeps your bookmarks in a real file on your disk. Here is exactly where, on every platform — and what to do with it once you've found it.

Chrome, Edge and Brave keep a JSON file named Bookmarks inside the profile folder. Firefox uses a database called places.sqlite. Safari uses Bookmarks.plist. All three can export the same portable bookmarks.html — and that file, not the browser's own, is the one worth keeping.

Find the file, per browser

Exact paths for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus each browser's own recovery route.

Google Chrome

The Bookmarks JSON file, the Bookmarks.bak recovery trick, and why acting fast matters.

Firefox

places.sqlite, the automatic daily backups in bookmarkbackups, and how to restore one.

Safari

Bookmarks.plist, iCloud's 30-day bookmark restore, and Time Machine.

Microsoft Edge

Where Edge favorites live now — and where the old Internet Explorer ones still are.

iPhone & Android

Why the file is unreachable on mobile, and the one supported way to get a real export off a phone.

Then do something with it

The four things people actually need once they've found the file.

What's inside a bookmarks file

The Netscape format explained: folders, ADD_DATE, embedded favicons, and what survives an import.

Reference

Recover deleted bookmarks

Close the browser first. What's recoverable per browser, how long you have, and what destroys the backup.

Start here if they're gone

Back them up properly

Why sync isn't a backup, what to export, where to keep it, and how to check the backup is real.

Ten seconds, quarterly

Move between browsers

Switching browsers or setting up a new machine, without ending up with two of everything.

Migration

The 30-second version

If you only want a copy of your bookmarks and don't care where the file lives, don't go hunting through profile folders — every browser has an export button that writes a standard bookmarks.html.

Chrome / Edge / Brave / Opera — Ctrl+Shift+O (⌘+⌥+B on Mac), then the ⋮ menu → Export bookmarks.
Firefox — Ctrl+Shift+O → Import and Backup → Export Bookmarks to HTML.
Safari — File → Export → Bookmarks.

That file is what every tool on this site reads, and it's the only bookmark backup worth having: plain text, importable by any browser, and still openable in thirty years.

Do it now, not later. Bookmark loss is almost always sudden — a profile that won't load, a sync that overwrites the good copy with an empty one, a reinstall that takes the profile folder with it. An export takes ten seconds and lives in your Documents folder forever.

Why the file matters more than the sync

Browser sync is not a backup. Its entire job is to make every device match, which means it replicates a deletion to all of them — usually before you notice.

Delete a folder of 400 bookmarks on your laptop and your phone loses them too, within seconds. A bookmarks.html sitting in a folder is the opposite: a frozen snapshot that nothing can reach back and change. The full argument, and what to do about it, is in backing up your bookmarks.

What's actually inside

Open an export in a text editor and you'll find plain HTML that hasn't changed since Netscape defined it in the 1990s:

<DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1698000000">Recipes</H3>
<DL><p>
    <DT><A HREF="https://example.com/soup" ADD_DATE="1698000123">Soup</A>
</DL><p>

Folders are H3 headings, bookmarks are links, and ADD_DATE is a Unix timestamp that browsers carry forward through every import — which is why your export often contains dates older than the computer you're reading it on. The format guide covers every attribute and what each browser does with it.

To read one properly, the viewer rebuilds the folder tree and adds search; the converter turns it into a spreadsheet.