Export Your Bookmarks Before a Service Shuts Down (Do It Today, Not When You Get the Email)

You've gotten this email before, or you will:

"We're sunsetting product on date. Please export your data before then."

Del.icio.us got sold, relaunched, and quietly faded. Google Reader shut down and took a generation's RSS habits with it. Google Bookmarks is gone. Pocket is winding down. None of these companies were small or careless — they just made a call that your bookmarks weren't core to their business anymore, and one day that call became your problem, on their timeline, not yours.

The fix isn't "pick a service that will never shut down" — you can't know that in advance, and betting on any single company's permanence is how people got burned by del.icio.us and Pocket in the first place. The fix is never being in a position where an export deadline matters, because you already have your own copy.

The five-minute checklist

Do this now, regardless of what you're currently using:

Find the export option. It's usually in settings, sometimes labeled "data," "backup," or buried under "account." If you can't find it in under two minutes, that's itself a signal.
Export to a real, open format — not a proprietary one only that service can read back in. For bookmarks, that's usually Netscape HTML (the format every browser and bookmark manager understands) or a plain JSON/CSV dump. Avoid formats that only round-trip through the same vendor.
Save it somewhere that isn't that service — your own drive, a cloud folder you control, wherever. The whole point is a copy that survives the vendor's decisions.
Check it actually opened. An export you haven't opened is a rumor, not a backup. Open the file, confirm your links and tags are actually in there.
Put a reminder on your calendar to redo this every few months. A backup from two years ago is missing two years of saves.

Step 4 matters more than people think. "I exported it" and "I confirmed the export is complete and readable" are different claims, and the difference is usually invisible until the day you need the file and it's empty, truncated, or missing your tags.

What "good" export support looks like

Not all exports are equal. When you're evaluating whether a bookmark manager respects your data, look for:

Self-serve, no support ticket required. If getting your data out means emailing support and waiting, that's a soft form of lock-in.
A real open format, not something proprietary. Netscape HTML bookmark files are the closest thing to a universal standard — every browser and most bookmark managers can import them.
Everything, not a subset. Tags, privacy settings, timestamps, notes — not just the raw URLs with the organization stripped out.
Available any time, not just at cancellation. A "we'll email you an export if you cancel" flow means you only find out it's broken after you've already left.

Where Cowpin stands on this

We built export as a first-class, always-available feature, specifically because we've watched this exact failure mode happen to other services' users — including, honestly, some of the people who migrated to Cowpin from a shutting-down service:

Export any time, from your account, in JSON, Netscape HTML, or the classic del.icio.us XML format — no ticket, no waiting for a "your account is closing" trigger.
Every field comes with it: tags, privacy status, read-later status, timestamps — not a stripped-down list of bare URLs.
Auto-archived full text on every saved bookmark, so even if the original page itself later disappears (a real, separate risk from the service going away), you still have the content, not just a dead link.
A real API, not just a manual export button, if you want to script your own backups on a schedule instead of remembering to click a button.

We'd rather you never need the export button. But we'd also rather you never have to worry about whether it exists, works, or will still be there in three years — so it's there, it's tested, and it's yours whenever you want it.

If you're currently on a service you're not sure will still be around next year, don't wait for the sunset email. Export your library today, wherever it currently lives — and if you'd like a home with a Pinboard- compatible API and export built in from day one, Cowpin is free to try.