How to keep your X bookmarks, before they vanish

A bookmark on X is a single tap and no more thought than that. There is no folder to file it into beyond X's own bookmark folders feature, which most people never set up, and the search over your saved posts is thin. So they accumulate. People who have used X for years routinely have several thousand bookmarks sitting behind one screen, in the order they were saved, findable only by scrolling.

That would be a minor annoyance if the posts underneath those bookmarks were permanent. They are not. An account gets deleted, suspended or set to private, or the person just deletes the one post you bookmarked, and the link in your list now points at nothing. A bookmark was never a copy. It was a pointer, and pointers break.

Does X's own data archive include your bookmarks?

No. X lets you request an archive of your account data from Settings and Privacy, under Your Account, then Download an Archive of Your Data. According to X's own help documentation, that archive is built around your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your media, your followers and following lists, your address book and the Lists you have created. Bookmarks are not on that list, and nothing in X's description of the archive mentions them.

This is not a bug or an oversight anyone at X has committed to fixing. It has been the case for years, and there is no indication in X's documentation that it is changing. If bookmarks matter to you, the official export is not the tool for the job, however useful it is for everything else.

Requesting it is still worth doing for the data it does hold.

1. Open X and sign in on the web or in the app. The request works from either.
2. Go to Settings and Privacy, then Your Account. This sits in the same menu as your login and security settings.
3. Select Download an Archive of Your Data. X will ask you to confirm your password before continuing.
4. Confirm your password and select Request Archive. X sends an email and an in-app notification once the archive is ready to download.

Do this regardless of what you decide about bookmarks specifically. It costs nothing and it is the one step that happens entirely inside X's own systems, which matters if an account is ever locked before you get any further.

What changed with X's API, and why it matters for bookmarks

For years, a small ecosystem of third-party tools read bookmarks straight out of X's developer API and saved them somewhere else. That route has narrowed. X's own developer documentation now describes its current API as pay-per-usage: no free tier for new developers, credits purchased up front, and a charge deducted for requests made against the platform, including reading your own bookmarks back through the official Bookmarks endpoint. Building or running a tool on that official API now means someone is paying X for every batch of bookmarks it retrieves.

That single change is why a lot of the bookmark-exporting advice still circulating online is out of date. A tool built two or three years ago against a free API tier either no longer works as described, now requires the developer to pay X to keep it running, or was quietly rebuilt to stop using the official API at all.

Because of that, most of the tools that still work for ordinary people, browser extensions that read your bookmarks page as it loads in your own logged-in tab, rather than calling X's paid API. That approach sidesteps the API cost entirely, but it also means the tool can only see what your browser has actually loaded, which is why scrolling matters in every method below.

What actually works right now

With the official export empty and the paid API a poor fit for a personal backup, three practical options are left, in order of how much they ask of you.

A browser extension that reads your bookmarks page. Several exist, built to scroll-and-capture your bookmarks tab as it loads, saving titles, links and media locally rather than through X's paid API. They work, but check what each one actually stores and where before installing anything with access to a logged-in tab.

Muse's own X import, covered in more detail below, works the same way: it reads your bookmark data as your own browser loads it, and sends nothing to X.

Saving bookmarks by hand. Slower, but it is the one method that needs nothing installed and gives you full control over what gets kept and how. For a handful of posts you actually want to keep long-term, rather than the whole pile, this is often the more reliable route: open the post, save the link, the text and a screenshot yourself, and you know exactly what you have.

What does Muse's X import actually do?

Muse's browser extension has an X-bookmarks toggle, off by default. Turn it on and it asks for permission to read x.com, the same kind of permission any extension needs to see the page you are on. Once it is granted, open your bookmarks page on X while signed in and scroll. Muse reads your bookmark data as X itself loads it into that page, the same information your own eyes are already seeing, and does not send anything to X in return.

Because it works this way, there is no fixed number Muse imposes. It only ever sees what X has loaded into the page, so how far back you go depends on how far you scroll. Photos come in at full resolution. Video is not embedded in the bookmarks page itself, so Muse resolves it separately from the original post's link once the bookmark is saved.

That is the whole mechanism. It is not a connection to your account that runs in the background, and it does not reach further back than what X shows you when you scroll. If you want everything, the honest advice is the same as scrolling any other feed to the bottom: it takes time, and there is no shortcut around it.

The one limit that applies no matter which method you use

Every route in this article, X's own archive if it ever adds bookmarks, a browser extension, Muse, or saving things by hand, runs into the same wall. What gets saved is the link, a preview image if one was available at the time, the text, and whatever title, tags or note you add. None of them download and preserve the actual page the way a page-archiving tool does.

That matters because of what happens next. If the original post is deleted, or the account behind it is suspended or deleted, the post itself is gone, wherever it was bookmarked. What survives is your own record of it: the text you saw, the image that came with it, and whatever note you attached explaining why you saved it in the first place. That record is real and it is useful, but it is not a copy of the internet. Treat it as your memory of the post, not a backup of the post itself, and none of these methods will disappoint you later.