Chrome’s bookmark manager doesn’t have an Undo option. If your finger slips, you could delete an entire folder full of bookmarks with no obvious way to recover them. If you’ve made a backup with the export option, you could import the backup – but the backup may already be out of date.

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First thing’s first: Don’t close and reopen Chrome. If Chrome is already closed, leave it closed. Chrome saves a single backup of your bookmarks file, and it overwrites the backup each time you launch Chrome.

Launch Windows Explorer and plug the following location into its address bar, replacing “NAME” with the name of your Windows user account:

C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

The folder contains two bookmark files – Bookmarks and Bookmarks.bak. Bookmarks.bak is the most recent backup, taken when you last opened your browser.

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If you don’t see the .bak file extension and just see two files named Bookmarks, click the Organize menu and select “Folder and search options.”

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In the Folder Options window, click over to the View tab and uncheck the “Hide extensions for known file types” option. You’ll now see the previously hidden .bak extension.

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To restore the backup, close all open Chrome browser windows. With Chrome closed, rename the Bookmarks file to Bookmarks.old and rename Bookmarks.bak to Bookmarks. (You should probably make a copy of both Bookmarks files and put them into another folder before you do any renaming).

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You’ll see your deleted bookmarks when you relaunch Chrome. Any bookmarks you’ve created since you last launched Chrome will be lost.