How to backup your Delicious bookmarks and import to Diigo

According to an article on The Next Web, Yahoo might be looking at closing down or possibly transform the social bookmarking service Delicious into some other Yahoo branded product. If you are like me, and have half your online memory archived on Delicious (I have more than 3,000 bookmarks), the thought of losing all those links is not all that attractive. But fear not, it is easy to do a backup and also to import the data into other services.

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Backup your Delicious bookmarks
To backup your bookmarks, first log in to your account at Delicious.com. Then go Settings and then Export/Backup Bookmarks.  There you can save all your bookmarks as an html file and by clicking the boxes for “include my tags” and “include my notes” you also will save that data. Press “Export” and save the html file to your computer.

Import to Diigo
If you don’t have an account, first join Diigo for free by selecting a username and password. Then (after activating your account via email confirmation) you got to Tools and Import Bookmarks. There, press the icon for Delicious and on the next page you will have two options. Either you select the html file on your computer, that you just saved from Delicious, or you import via API by filling in your Delicious username and password. (I actually did both by mistake, but luckily it didn’t import twice.)

If you have many bookmarks, the import to Diigo will take several hours, but it worked really well. The only thing that I have noticed so far that didn’t work, is that the bookmarks marked “private” in Delicious are not private in Diigo after the import and you will have to change that manually, which of course most people won’t do.

Also, the old tags are imported, but you can’t filter via old tags in the Library, unless you search for it. However, if you add a new item to Diigo with a new tag, it automatically finds your old stuff from Delicious with the same tag.

There are other ways to import your old Delicious bookmarks to other services or browsers, but with Diigo at least now you have a backup plan in case Delicious will disappear.