Importing and Exporting Your Internet Explorer Favorites

Nowadays everyone uses the internet to do things such as shop, check the weather, go on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as do countless other things. With all the websites we go to its nice to be able to save your favorite ones for easy access so that you don’t have to remember website addresses each time you want to go back to that site or have to type in the entire address itself. This is where web browser favorites, or bookmarks as they are sometimes called come into play.

Favorites are used by Internet Explorer to save your favorite or most commonly used websites in one place for easy access. Other browsers may call these favorite sites bookmarks but Internet Explorer sticks with the term favorites. Now keep in mind that just because your favorites are on one computer doesn’t mean you can’t have them on your other computers as well.

If there comes a time when you get a new or different computer, you may want to be able to access your favorites from your old computer. Its also a good idea to back up your favorites just in case your computer dies and you have no way of recovering them. But in order to use your favorites on another computer you will need to bring them from your old over to your new computer. To do this you need to export them from the old and import them into the new computer.

Follow these steps to export your Internet Explorer favorites to a file

  • Open Internet Explorer
  • Go to File then, Import and Export
  • To export your favorites click on Export to a file and then click Next.
  • Check the boxes of the items you want to export. For most cases it will just be Favorites.
  • If you want to export all of your favorites make sure the Favorites folder is highlighted and click Next.
  • Browse to the location where you want to save your bookmarks to. You will notice it uses the default name of bookmark.htm which is fine.
  • Then click on Export and then on Finish

To import you favorites into Internet Explorer do the following:

  • Open Internet Explorer
  • Go to File then, Import and Export
  • Select Import from a file and click Next
  • Select the items you want to import. Most of the time it will just be Favorites. Then click Next.
  • Browse to the location of where you have your bookmark.htm file from your other computer and click Next.
  • Click on Favorites and then on Import.

Another way is to find your Favorites folder located under your username in your user profile. Once you find this folder you can simply copy it to a removable drive and then paste it in your user profile on your other computer. Just keep in mind that if you overwrite the Favorites folder on the destination computer then any favorites you had there will be gone. Check out the video at the top of the page for details on how to backup your favorites using this procedure.

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