Undoubtedly, Google Chrome is a popular internet browser, but sometimes it becomes unstable because of certain problems from time to time caused into it. In such a case, the users would have the only choice to uninstall and re-install their Chrome to avoid scratch. This solves all the problems that they are running with.
But, when you uninstall Chrome, the data won’t be on your computer anymore. However, if you are signed in to Chrome and sync your data, some of the information might be on Google’s servers. Here, in this article, we will guide you how to uninstall and reinstall Google Chrome without losing bookmarks.
In order to make sure that you won’t lose your bookmarks after uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome, the first task is to export your favorites or use the activated synchronization before perform the un-installation and reinstallation process.
Go to C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default and take a backup of the Bookmarks.bak and Bookmarks file. Once you have reinstalled, restore these two files in the same location. If you an activated synchronization, you would have nothing to do –all your favorites, histories, passwords and etc are already saved into the cloud and will be restore after the reinstallation. The entire steps to uninstall and re-install Chrome without losing bookmarks are provided below:
Here is how to uninstall Google Chrome:
- Go to the Control Panel and select Programs and Features in it,
- Under settings, click on Applications> Applications and Features,
- Tick the box that says Also delete your browsing data and click Uninstall the then.
If you receive the error message “Please close all Chrome windows and try again” during the process, you would have to delete all Chrome processes. You can do this via command prompt: taskkill /f /im chrome.exe /t or via Powershell: Stop-Process -processname Chrome.
After this, you would have to confirm if all Chrome folders are deleted. Open % LOCALAPPDATA% \ Google (C: \ Users \ \ AppData \ Local \ Google) folder in the File Explorer and check if there exists a folder named Chrome. If yes, just delete it to complete the Chrome un-installation process and then processed to the steps download the installer from Google Chrome and then reinstall Chrome on your PC.
Here are the steps to download and re-install Google Chrome:
- From any web browser that works, navigate to https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/desktop/,
- Click on Download Chrome on the opened window,
- Follow the on-screen instructions and to finish the installation process.
The then, activate synchronization or import the favorites exported earlier to restore the data. This process will be completed in the below three steps.
Here are the steps to recover my bookmarks after reinstalling Chrome:
- Rename your Bookmarks file to something like Bookmarks, old,
- Change the file Bookmarks.bak to just Bookmarks,
- Remove the …. Open Chrome and see if you managed to restore the missing bookmarks.
