How to recover deleted favorites in Microsoft Edge

Updated 18 October 2026

Edge no longer has a restore button: Microsoft removed Restore deleted favorites in version 128.0.2739.42. Deleted favorites (bookmarks) can still come back from Bookmarks.bak, a backup in your Edge profile folder, from a computer that hasn’t synced the delete yet, or from an old export. Copy Bookmarks.bak to your desktop now, before Edge restarts and replaces it.

What happened to Restore deleted favorites

Edge 117 (September 2023) let people signed in with sync on restore lost or deleted favorites from the Favorites menu or edge://favorites. Microsoft’s support article later said the feature was removed in Edge 128.0.2739.42, released on 22 August 2024, and Microsoft has since retired that article; its address now opens the favorites bar help page. Guides that send you to a restore icon in the Favorites menu describe the older Edge.

Pick your route

1. Restore from Bookmarks.bak

Edge is built on Chromium, and like Chrome it keeps favorites in a file called Bookmarks with a backup, Bookmarks.bak, beside it. Chromium copies Bookmarks to Bookmarks.bak the first time your favorites change after the browser starts, so the backup shows them as they were when the current session began.

Other profiles have their own folders next to Default; edge://version shows yours under Profile path. Copy Bookmarks.bak to your desktop and drop the copy into our bookmarks JSON to HTML tool, which reads Edge’s file and lists what it found before you download anything.

Option A, the safe one: convert and import

1. Download the HTML file the tool builds from your copy.
2. In Edge, go to Settings > Profiles > Import browser data, select Import next to Import browser data now, choose Favorites or bookmarks HTML file and pick the file.
3. The backup arrives in a folder on the favorites bar, which may be named Imported. Drag back what you lost, then delete the rest of that folder.

Nothing you have now is replaced, and with sync on the restored favorites reach your other devices like any new favorite.

Option B: swap the files

1. Edge can keep running after its last window closes, so first turn off startup boost and background mode in edge://settings/system. Then close every Edge window (Command+Q on a Mac), and if an Edge icon sits in the system tray, close Edge from there too.
2. In the profile folder, move Bookmarks to your desktop as a fallback.
3. Copy Bookmarks.bak and rename the copy to Bookmarks, with no extension. In File Explorer, View > Show > File name extensions shows the real name.
4. Start Edge and check your favorites.

The swap replaces all your favorites with the backup, so anything saved since then drops out (the file on your desktop still has it). With sync on, the delete can come back from your other devices and remove the restored favorites again, so synced profiles are better off with option A.

2. Rescue them from a computer that hasn’t synced

Microsoft says deleted favorites sync to every signed-in copy of Edge with sync on, but each copy only gets the delete once it connects. A computer that hasn’t opened Edge since then still has the old favorites:

1. Disconnect that computer from the internet first (turn off Wi-Fi or unplug the cable).
2. Open Edge, press Ctrl+Shift+O, select More options > Export favorites and save the file.
3. Reconnect, then import the file on your main computer as in option A.

Phones can’t do this job, since Microsoft’s help for the Edge app has no export.

3. If you removed a profile

Microsoft says removing a profile permanently deletes its favorites, history, passwords and form data from the computer, while data synced to your account may still be in Microsoft’s cloud.

• It was signed in with sync on: click the profile icon, choose Set up a new profile, sign in with the same account and select Sign in to sync data. The synced favorites should come back as sync catches up.
• It never synced: the copy on the computer is gone, so only an export or a File History backup can help (route 4).

4. Older backups

An export from before the delete imports in a minute (importing into Edge). File History is the other hope, but it saves your libraries and the Desktop by default, so it only has Edge’s folder if you added it. If you did, right-click the profile folder in File Explorer (or the User Data folder, for a removed profile), choose Restore previous versions, pick a version from before the delete and use Restore to… so nothing current is overwritten. Convert the Bookmarks file you get back with the same tool and import it.

Make the next one painless

Export your favorites every month or so (how to export from Edge) and keep the file off the computer.