Saturday, January 23, 2010

Backing up my Delicious bookmarks

I use Delicious for all my web bookmarks. I like it because it lets me tag bookmarks, write notes about them, and also access them easily from all my browsers and computers. Bookmarking pages to Delicious is easy thanks to an add-on for Firefox and a bookmarklet for other browsers.

While I've never had a problem with Delicious, like all services in the cloud, I do like to make a personal backup of my data. Deilcious makes this easy with a nice HTTP API. So I wrote a python script to pull down all my bookmarks as a xml file. I just run it as a cron job every night and it makes copy of all my bookmarks. This way if Delicious ever drops off the face of the earth, it may take some work, but I know I can reconstruct all my data.