Computer and Web Articles

Last week one of my dear readers, Ernie, asked for a review on how to go about saving one’s Internet Explorer favorites.

Backing up your Internet Explorer Favorites is both simple and smart. With a backup you can transfer your favorites to your laptop or reinstall them if (knock on wood) your browser crashes and you lose the beloved list of great websites you’ve been collecting for years.

To backup your favorites:

1. Open Internet Explorer (the little blue “e” on your desktop) and click on the File menu in the upper left hand corner, then choose Import and Export. The wizard window that pops open will guide you through the process of exporting your Favorites to a backup file. (Make sure you select Export Favorites, not Import Favorites here!)
2. When you get to the option where you have to choose “Export to an application” or “Export to a File or Address,” choose the latter and make sure you save your backup file to a place that’s easy to remember, such as your “My Documents” folder.
3. After completing the step-by-step process, you’ll have a backup “.htm” file sitting on your computer. Whenever you’d like to install these saved faves onto another computer (or reinstall on yours), you simply return to the Import and Export wizard within Internet Explorer, choose Import Favorites instead of Export Favorites, and browse to the location of your saved backup file.

These files aren’t very big, so you can e-mail them to other computers if you’d like.