Backup Delicious Bookmarks From The Shell

Linux/Mac only: Social bookmarking service Delicious is a great way to save and share your bookmarks, but what happens if they go the way of JournalSpace and lose all your data? You need backups!

Since Delicious is owned by Yahoo there isn’t a serious risk of complete data loss, but it’s better to have a local backup of your data than risk losing your account with no recourse for data retrieval. Since there are a number of ways to accomplish this, we’ll cover the geekiest method today, which was derived from but slightly different from the article linked below.

Open up a terminal prompt and type in the following, replacing username and password with your Delicious credentials.

curl -k --user username:password -o backup.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'

If you don’t have curl installed, you can also use this wget command to perform the exact same task:

wget --no-check-certificate --user=username --password=password -Obackup.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all

At this point the backup.xml file should contain an xml representation of your bookmarks. You could even get really slick and schedule this as a daily or weekly cron job.

You can alternatively create a manual backup at any time by simply navigating your web browser to https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all, entering your Delicious credentials when prompted, and then saving the resulting xml to a file. Note: Instead of doing backups you could synchronise with your browser using the official Delicious extensions for Firefox or Internet Explorer.