Recovering lost bookmarks in Chrome

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I recently responded to a prompt from the Chrome browser (on Windows vii) without fully understanding the question. Lesson learned, the hard mode. This carelessness wiped out my carefully curated bookmarks, which had never been backed up.

The proficient news is that, at least on Windows 7, all may not be lost. Even without Google/Chrome backups, I was able to recover the bookmarks thanks to a suggestion I establish on YouTube.

Many online suggestions for recovering Chrome bookmarks on Windows involve files called "Bookmarks" and "Bookmarks.bak". Swapping these files may assistance in some instances, but in my case, both files were the aforementioned size, had the same very contempo timestamp and were very small. No doubt, if the backup bookmark file had my bookmarks it would accept been larger than the original file.

Things looked bleak until I ran beyond a video from Feb 2014 called "How to recover bookmarks in Google Chrome" by YouTube user GRkostas10611. The key idea in the video was non to deal with Chrome but to deal with Windows.

Restore Points in Windows 7 fill-in both system files and user files. The user files backup is totally transparent. Personally, I had never paid any attending to the feature at all other than initially configuring Organisation Restore on a new calculator (shown below).

Of course Windows doesn't know annihilation about Chrome bookmarks. To recover bookmarks, the video suggested recovering the binder where they live. Over fourth dimension, this may modify, but at least now (Chrome version 39.0.2171.95) Chrome stores bookmarks in the "User Information" folder located under

C:\Users\<Windows userid>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\

The process is easy; navigate to the User Information binder in Windows Explorer, right click on it and get the backdrop. Become to the Previous Versions tab and, if you lot are lucky, there will be a list of bachelor backups. To restore a folder backup, highlight it and click the Restore button. If all goes well, you should see the bulletin below that "The binder has been successfully restored to the previous version".

The video doesn't suggest making a backup of the folder before recovering it, only it would be the wise matter to do. It's also a good idea to shut down Chrome before recovering the User Data folder. In my case, the only available fill-in was vi days quondam, your mileage, of class, will vary.

Without my bookmarks, the User Data binder was 172 megabytes. Afterwards the restore, information technology had ballooned up to 550 MB. About of the space was in a binder called "Default" which had not existed before the restore.

The fill-in that I restored was dated December 23rd, but after the restore, there were files in the User Data binder with a timestamp of the current day, the 29th. I can only assume that Windows restores the files it has, merely does not delete files it has not backed up. The recovery process is thus more of a merge than a full restore.

Whatsoever the process, my dearest bookmarks had been restored.

All the same, the outset fourth dimension Chrome ran after the restore, it wasn't all that happy. As you tin see below, information technology didn't think it had shut down correctly, the Chrome bill of fare was orange and information technology wanted me to sign in again.

The heck with that - the first thing I did was backup the newly restored bookmarks to an HTML file. The process is uncomplicated (see Import or export bookmarks) and, needless to say, I'll be doing it more often.

Some of the YouTube comments annotation that this approach does not piece of work on Windows 8. I mostly avoid Windows 8, but a HowToGeek article from May 2014 confirms that Windows 8 Restore Points no longer include user files.

Days later, I realized some other manner to restore the bookmarks - from an image backup. As someone concerned with Defensive Calculating, I make periodic prototype backups of the machines I maintain. As a rule, prototype backup programs let y'all view the files included in a previous fill-in and copy them from the fill-in to a computer.

I conclude with some words I never expected to write: thank yous Microsoft.

Michael Horowitz is an contained consultant who has long been focused on Defensive Computing.

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