My poor friend Justin had a bit of a disaster today. He imported his Google Reader feeds into a service called Feedly, and didn’t realize that editing/deleting the feeds in Feedly meant that he was also changing them in gReader — they were linked. In doing so, he lost a ton of valuable and tailor-made (via Yahoo Pipes) feeds.

This post isn’t about Feedly though, since this is an issue they’re addressing (and they’re also only 5 days old, so we’ll cut them some slack this time). I just wanted to remind people that they can import and export a snapshot of their feeds with OPML, and bookmarks with HTML and OPML. If you’re switching bookmarking services or installing a new RSS reader, it’s much easier to use these files than manually upload everything. However, it’s not the kind of thing that will sync itself automatically, so you need to save it every once in a while to stay current (if you’re using it for backup purposes, and not just as a one time import).

Del.icio.us:

Which then leads to:

Google Reader:

Yeah, most of you already knew this, probably. But I figured that a reminder is always nice in case it’s been a while since you’ve backed up all you bookmarks and feeds. I mean, most of us backup our computer files every day, so why not our data online? You never know what can go wrong.

UPDATE: Joffi sent me this handy blog post that might save a few Google Readers too!

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