I’ve been using delicious.com, nee del.icio.us, for my bookmarks on and off since early 2006, but only recently have I decided to really keep all my bookmarks there. Yahoo!‘s future has been somewhat questionable as of late and I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of not having my data backed up in a place where I can get at if the service goes down. I don’t really have control over the former, but the latter I do.

Delicious has a tool to export your bookmarks that gives you an HTML bookmark file for easy importing into a browser, but, alas, it’s not really scriptable. However, they do offer a way to dump all your bookmarks to xml using their API.

So, I whipped up the following bash script to perform the backup and tossed it in ~/bin/deliciousBackup:

#!/bin/bash

# 
# deliciousBackup - delicious.com bookmarks backup
#
# See: http://delicious.com/help/api#posts_all
# 
# v0.1   2009-01-25 - Morgan Aldridge <morgant@makkintosshu.com>
#                     Initial version.
# 

user='<username>'
pass='<password>'
date=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
src='https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'
dst='Users/<username>/Documents/Backups'

curl -s --user $user:$pass $src | bzip2 > $dst/delicious.com-$user-$date.xml.bz2

I needed to make deliciousBackup executable, but also wanted to make sure it wasn’t readable by any other user/group since it contains my password in plain text:

chmod 700 ~/bin/deliciousBackup

Of course, if someone ever had direct access to my hard drive they could still pull my Delicious password from that file, so consider yourself warned.

I prefer to run most of my backup scripts and such using launchd instead of cron since it follows my home folder sync better, so I tossed the following .plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.makkintosshu.deliciousBackup-morgant.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string><tld>.<domain>.delciousBackup-<user></string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Users/<user>/bin/deliciousBackup</string>
	</array>
	<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
	<dict>
		<key>Hour</key>
		<integer>12</integer>
		<key>Minute</key>
		<integer>0</integer>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The following call loaded my LaunchAgent without a logout:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.makkintosshu.deliciousBackup-morgant.plist

You’ll note that the LaunchAgent runs every day at noon. That’s because I currently run this on my MacBook Air which may not be online most nights, but is usually online by mid-day.

Feel free to use this method if you’re so inclined.