How do I export MSN Favorites?

Most people that use MSN take advantage of their book marking feature called MSN Favorites. If you come across a great website, you can easily save the address to visit it later with a simple mouse click. One way in which MSN goes beyond the traditional browser favorites feature is that it allows users to easily save their favorites - even when they are not on their own computers (e.g. work computer). While MSN Favorites has received high marks for its service, it can be quite difficult to export your MSN Favorites to other services or to your own computer's hard drive. Here are some tips on how to do it.

There are a variety of fairly easy ways to export MSN Favorites to your hard drive or other book marking services, including saving specific files to your computer using simple software, or transferring them to MS Windows Live Favorites and then to MS Internet Explorer.

Exporting MSN Favorites by copying files to your Hard Drive

If you would like to export MSN Favorites to your hard drive, you will first need to find them and then easily copy them. For the most part, MSN favorites are saved on a MS server, but you can usually gain access to your specific files which can be located at: C:\WINDOWS\ApplicationData\MSN6\UserData\{F18828C0-4ACD-01C4-0100-0000F907654A}

There are three types of files you should be looking for. They include favorites.xml, favthumb.dbx and favcache.xml.

Exporting MSN Favorites by using Third Party software

There are many third party software products available on the web (mostly freeware) that can easily export your MSN Favorites to your IE Favorites or other book mark service. One software product available is called MSN Favorites Export Toolkit. This software works by transforming MSN Favorites files (favorites.xml) into Netscape favorites files (bookmark.htm). While MSN Favorites files can't be directly transferred into your IE browser, Netscape bookmark files can.

Once your files are in Netscape bookmark form, you can pretty much do whatever you like with them from saving them to your hard drive, transferring them to your browser, or saving them to your favorite book marking site.

Exporting MSN Favorites to Windows Live Favorites

Another simple way to export your MSN Favorites is to first transfer them to MS Windows Live Favorites. Windows Live Favorites is Microsoft's new social book marking site. Your MSN Favorites can easily be transferred to this site and then, once stored on Window's Live Favorites, be transferred to your browser, hard drive, or chosen social book marking site.