Recover Favorites Menu bar – Chrome


Google Chrome Favorites bookmarks menu bar recovery

Google Chrome seems to have gone to extra lengths to make recovering lost bookmarks as difficult as possible.

The designers of the world’s most popular internet browser neglected to include an “undo” option while engineering the fastest and most secure internet browser. Consequently, you could conceivably delete your entire Chrome bookmarks list with one slip of a mouse with no way to recover them. Even if you were farsighted enough to make a backup, chances are the backup would probably be outdated at the time of the catastrophe. Unless, of course, you were in the habit of backing up your Chrome bookmarks on a daily basis. Something that most of us are not in the habit of doing.

But remember, I said it was almost impossible—not impossible. So, if you’ve managed to do the unthinkable, do not compound the problem by closing and reopening Chrome. If you’ve already closed it, let it stay closed. You see, Chrome actually saves a copy of your bookmarks on your hard drive, but it overwrites that file each time you launch the browser.

  • Instead, launch Windows Explorer and type this address into the address bar, remembering to replace “Name” with the name you use with your windows account: C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Up pops a popup window with a list of files, including the ones containing your bookmarks. There are actually two such files in the list, “Bookmarks,” and “Bookmarks.bak.”

The Bookmarks.bak file is the one that has your most recent Chrome bookmarks in it.

If both files are listed simply as “Bookmarks” with no “.bak” extension, you’ll need to do a little more work to determine which one is actually Chromes actual .bak file.

So, click on the Organize menu and select the “folder and search options.”

  • In the “Folder Options” window, navigate over to the “View” tab and uncheck the box next to the “Hide extensions for known file types” option. This will reveal the file extensions so that you can see which one of your bookmark files is the .bak file.

Now, in order to restore your bookmarks

  • Close all open Chrome windows and then delete the Bookmarks file and rename the .bak file as your Bookmarks file.

The next time you launch Chrome, you’ll see all your old bookmarks just as if you never deleted them in the first place.

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