How to recover Google Chrome bookmarks

If you have deleted the bookmarks you need in Google Chrome in one way or another, in some cases, with a successful coincidence, they can be restored. Unfortunately, not always, but worth a try.

This tutorial details two ways to restore bookmarks in Chrome browser after deleting or otherwise losing them. Before proceeding, I highly recommend that you back up your bookmarks in case something goes wrong: to do this, in Chrome on your PC or Mac, open the bookmarks manager in the settings, click on the menu button and select “Export bookmarks”.

Recover Chrome bookmarks by re-syncing from another device

If you deleted Chrome bookmarks on one device – a computer or laptop, Android or iPhone, while you have enabled synchronization with your Google account and you did not manage to delete them on some other device from the same account, then when you connect this second device to the Internet and launching a browser on it, the changes will be synchronized (i.e. bookmarks will be deleted on it). However, until this happens, we can use the bookmarks available there to restore. The order of actions, depending on the situation, may be as follows.

If both devices, both with saved and deleted bookmarks, are a computer or laptop (i.e. they have the usual desktop versions of Google Chrome installed):

1. Without launching Chrome, turn off the Internet on the second device without letting it sync.
2. Launch Chrome on the second device without Internet access and open the bookmark manager by pressing Ctrl + Shift + O (or in the menu – Bookmarks – Bookmark manager).
3. In the bookmarks manager, click on the menu button and select the “Export bookmarks” item. Specify where to save bookmarks.
4. Copy the saved file to the first computer (where the bookmarks disappeared), open the bookmarks manager and select “Import bookmarks” from its menu. Import the file from step 3.

If the first or second device is a smartphone or tablet:

1. 1. On a device with untouched bookmarks, just in case, turn off the Internet (if we are talking about a phone – both mobile and Wi-Fi). After that, you can look into Chrome without the Internet and see if the bookmarks deleted on the source device are saved there. If so, you can continue.
   2. On the device where the bookmarks disappeared, go to https://chrome.google.com/sync
   3. On the specified page, click the Stop Synchronization button. In this case, bookmarks and other data will be deleted from the Chrome servers (but then we can restore them from the “untouched” device).
   4. After deleting data on the Google server, turn on the Internet on the second device with saved bookmarks and launch the Chrome browser. If necessary, sign in and turn on sync (usually not required) and wait for sync to complete (may take several minutes). If syncing doesn’t finish, turn off syncing in Chrome settings and then turn it back on.
   5. Turn on sync on the device where the bookmarks originally disappeared. Wait for the sync to finish. If syncing does not complete for a long time, turn it off (sign out of your Chrome account) and then turn it back on.

As a result, bookmarks from the second device will be placed on Google’s servers, and then synchronized with the Google Chrome browser on the device where they were somehow lost.

Restore bookmarks from a bookmarked backup file (computer only)

Google Chrome for Windows and Mac stores an automatically generated bookmark backup file that you can use for recovery.

On Windows, this file is located in a folder (AppData folder is hidden)

C: \ Windows \ Users \ UserName \ AppData \ Local \ Google \ Chrome \ User Data \ Default

On Mac OS, the location is as follows:

Users \ UserName \ Library \ Application Support \ Google \ Chrome \ Default

In the specified folders you will find two files – Bookmarks and Bookmarks.bak. The first is the bookmarks in Chrome at this point in time. The second is a bookmark backup. You can do this with them:

1. Close Google Chrome if it is running.
2. Move the Bookmarksfile to a different location (in case you need to correct the results of the described steps).
3. Rename the bakfile to simply Bookmarks.
4. Launch Google Chrome again.

As a result, Chrome will download the bookmarks from the backup. However, it is impossible to predict (except by the date of the backup file and its size) whether the necessary bookmarks you have lost will be in it.