I love OneTab, and you should, too. It’s an incredibly easy way to take the nightmare of tabs you’ve been saving in your browser window and condense them all into a single, easy-to-scan web page. I use this extension constantly, and it has helped me turn my overflowing tab problem into a more manageable mess.
Here’s one secret I’ve picked up during my time as a OneTab aficionado: It’s not enough to turn your many tabs into a single, navigable page. You need to make sure you’re backing up that page (or its contents), because one crash, glitch, or other browser boo-boo, and you’ll have lost everything you’ve been saving. It has happened to me before — rarely, I should note — and that’s why I’m a bit crazier about backups now.
My OneTab extension got all messed up and corrupted and I lost thousands of tabs I’d saved over the past year and I’m wondering why I didn’t… I don’t know, back it up somehow?
— Yael Grauer (@yaelwrites) August 29, 2019
To back up your OneTab-saved sites, you have a few options. The first and easiest method is to simply share your list of saved sites as a web page, and then save that web page anywhere on your PC. As an added bonus, this makes all the links easily clickable and they won’t disappear from the list when you click them (as you’ve surely noticed if you’ve ever clicked a link directly a on OneTab page).
You can also use OneTab’s “Export / Import URLs” feature to dump a text file of all of your saved URLs. You won’t be able to click on them very easily, but you can import them into any OneTab instance you want—whether that’s on your computer, because something mucked up and you lost all your URLs, or a different computer entirely.
If you haven’t tried either option and you end up losing all your saved websites as a result of a crash or other issue, you might still be able to restore your missing list of sites by digging deep into your Chrome databases.
There’s no guarantee this will work, and you’ll probably need to grab or fire up a file-recovery tool like Recuva as soon as it happens, but it’s worth investigating in case of a catastrophe.
My advice? Use OneTab to clean up a busy browser, but don’t neglect bookmarks. Your browser can crash, but your bookmarks should (hopefully) survive any issues. They’ll always be there for you, forever, whenever you need them.
They’re easy to organise — even automatically, if you’re feeling lazy — and they’re a much better long-term archival solution than even the mighty OneTab, as helpful as that extension is.
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