Dave, I have a number of different computers running Mac OS X, and would like to keep my Safari bookmarks in sync. I don’t necessarily need to to have these bookmarks accessible within other Web browsers (though it’d be a bonus if Firefox saw them too) but if I designate one as my master bookmark file, is there any way to have my other Safari browsers stay synchronized?
Safari bookmarks are stored in your ~/Library/Safari folder, so at it’s most basic, you can easily copy the bookmarks file from machine to machine.
The format of this file is kinda funky, it’s not a simple HTML-based file as with most other Web browsers, but rather a hard-to-read XML datafile that is faster for programs to parse, but pretty much impossible for us wetware to eyeball.
In this instance, I’m going to assume that the machines are networked and that the remote system is called “Laptop” and that it’s already connected.
$ cd ~/Library/Safari $ cp Bookmarks.plist \ /Volumes/Laptop/Users/taylor/Library/Safari $ cd
This will overwrite the laptop’s bookmark list and, in a rather aggressive way, synchronize the two bookmark lists.
If you can’t get the two to network because they’re in different locations, you can easily email the bookmarks.plist file to yourself then retreive it on the remote system, or upload it to a central backup disk or server (that is, something like .Mac or a Web server).
Digging around a bit, Firefox has a really weird way of storing its bookmarks too (even though it’s ostensibly an HTML file) so automatically syncing the two with some code looks pretty tough. The Firefox bookmarks are stored, on my system, in /Users/taylor/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/6j6l7kgv.default/bookmarks.html, but if that weird directory path isn’t enough to make you say “hmmmm….” then check out the first few lines of the file itself:
$ head bookmarks.html <!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1> <!-- This is an automatically generated file. It will be read and overwritten. DO NOT EDIT! --> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE> <H1 LAST_MODIFIED="1103387323">Bookmarks</H1> <DL><p> <DT><H3 PERSONAL_TOOLBAR_FOLDER="true" ID="rdf:#$FvPhC3">Bookmarks Toolbar Folder</H3>
The good news is that if you really need to keep everything in sync, there are a number of slick shareware and freeware Web browser bookmark synchronization tools available on the Mac, including BookmarkTool,
URLManager Pro (which looks like the best of the bunch), and
Bookit.
I cannot find the ~/Library/Safari folder on my WIN7 unit…Where is it…Is it hidden?
How do I keep my Mac OS X Safari bookmarks in sync?
Dave, I have a number of different computers running Mac OS X, and would like to keep my Safari bookmarks in sync. I don’t necessarily need to to have these bookmarks accessible within other Web browsers (though it’d be a…