This technique will make use of the mklink command that is available with Vista and Windows 7 which will essentially just link to a folder outside of your Dropbox directory so that Dropbox will include it in its backup routine. There are downloadable tools available for XP however if you are on that.
- In the Firefox navigation bar, type about:config and press enter (accept the warning message).
- Search for browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML and change this value to true. This will create a bookmarks.html file containing your bookmarks in your Firefox profile directory every time you close Firefox.
- Open a command prompt in Administrator mode (in Windows 7 you can do this by hitting the windows key, typing cmd, then ctrl-shift-enter, then Alt-Y to accept the elevation prompt).
- Navigate to your drop box directory with cd [Dropbox directory path].
- Find out where your Firefox profile is located by opening Firefox and finding Help->Troubleshooting Information in the menu. Beside where it says Profile Directory, click the button Open Containing Folder.
- Copy this folder location (you can do this by typing Alt-D then Ctl-C).
- Back in your command prompt, where “FirefoxProfile” is the name of the folder you are creating in your Dropbox directory (change this if you wish), type:
- mklink /D FirefoxProfile then right click and choose paste to insert your Firefox profile location and push enter.
- You should have something that looks like the following:
Your bookmarks along with your entire Firefox profile will be backed up to Dropbox automatically whenever you close Firefox.
If you don’t already have Dropbox, I highly recommend getting it – if you sign up with the following link: http://db.tt/qZpeNIFp you will get an additional 250MB of storage space than the normal 2GB.
Further Reading
At the beginning of doing this, I really only wanted to backup the single bookmarks.html file that Firefox produces when you turn the autoExportHTML option on by creating a hard link to this using the mklink /H option. This would work great normally – however, the way Firefox handles the bookmarks.html file is it will delete it and recreate it again when Firefox closes. This causes the hard link to be disassociated and you end up with a stale copy of the bookmarks.html file in your Dropbox folder that never updates. I then thought that I might as well be backing up my entire Firefox profile anyway.
Also, it’s not compulsory to turn on the autoExportHTML option as your bookmarks will still be in your profile – but I think it’s nice having that there for a rainy day – plus it will also allow Launchy if you use it (which I spoke a bit about here) to index your bookmarks by turning on the following option in the Weby plugin:
