A thorough excavation of your Arc Browser data. Spaces, pins, folders, open tabs, and the auto-archived tabs other exporters leave buried. Runs entirely in your browser. No servers. No payments. No data leaves your machine.
Arc quietly files most of what you've ever opened. Pinned tabs get remembered. Folders get saved. But the tabs Arc auto-archives after a day, a week, a month... those are where years of research live. And every other exporter we tried walks right past them.
Recipe links. Job postings from 2023. The essay you meant to read. arcaeologist digs it out, filters the noise, groups it by the month it got buried, and hands it back in a standard HTML bookmarks file. Back it up. Move it somewhere else. Just own it. Your call.
Three tools. One matrix. No spin.
| Feature | arcaeologist | ArcEscape | export-arc-bookmarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pinned tabs & nested folders | ✓ | ✓ | partial |
| Auto-archived tabs the buried years | ✓ with month folders | — | — |
| Open (unpinned) tabs | ✓ per space | partial | — |
| Per-profile favorites separated, not jumbled | ✓ | mixed | mixed |
| One bookmarks file per space | ✓ + combined zip | — | — |
| Chrome/Safari import works | ✓ | ✓ | "first space only" |
| Price | free · MIT | free tier capped · $5 unlimited | free · MIT |
Drop your two JSON files. Everything happens in this tab. No upload, no account, no trace.
Or take a single space:
Your download is a standard Netscape bookmarks file. Import anywhere:
No. The page is a static HTML file. Your JSON files are read in your browser via FileReader, parsed in memory, written to a download Blob, and discarded when you close the tab. There is no backend, no analytics, no telemetry, no tracking pixel, no third-party fetch of any kind. Check the Network tab.
Arc records two kinds of archive events: auto (a tab aged out of your sidebar because Arc's auto-archive timer closed it) and manual (you closed it deliberately). The manual events are tabs you wanted gone — exporting them is noise. The auto events are the years of research you didn't know you had. Those are what we dig up.
Because Arc genuinely stores them that way. Arc's favorites (the top-row icons) are tied to a Chrome profile, not a space. If Personal, Money, Work, and Music all share your default profile, they share one favorites row in Arc's UI. We preserve that faithfully in the export — each space's file is standalone and includes its favorites.
Probably. Arc's on-disk JSON format has been stable for years. If they ship a breaking change, the parser logs warnings instead of crashing, and the code is short enough to patch in an afternoon. Open an issue.
Yes. Clone the repo, open index.html in any modern browser. The fonts load from Google Fonts the first time; after that everything is local. If you want fully offline, self-host the fonts or remove the font link.
Probably not. Tested against ~13K archived items and ~7K live items — parses in under a second, dedupes, writes a ~700 KB HTML file. If yours is much larger and it chokes, open an issue with your item counts.
If arcaeologist saved you two hours of grief, pay it forward. Entirely optional. Forever free regardless.