Pocket is gone. Here's how to rescue your saves.

Updated July 2026

Pocket's Premium subscriptions stopped on May 22, 2025, the service switched off on July 8, 2025, and the export window officially closed on October 8, 2025. Somewhere between 20 and 30 million people had saves in Pocket — over two billion articles — and most of that reading history is now trapped in export files sitting in download folders, or gone entirely.

If you exported your archive before the shutdown, this guide is about giving those saves a home that can't be shut down remotely. If you didn't, skip to the last section.

What a Pocket export actually contains

Pocket produced two formats over the years, and both are still importable today:

The legacy HTML export (ril_export.html) — a Netscape-style bookmarks file with your unread and archived lists, timestamps and tags.
The 2025 shutdown archive — a ZIP containing CSV files (part_000000.csv and so on) with title, URL, added time, tags and status columns.

What to look for in a new home

Pocket's shutdown taught one lesson clearly: a cloud service can take your library with it. Whatever you migrate to, check three things:

It imports both Pocket formats — many tools only read the HTML file.
It can export everything back out — HTML, CSV, JSON, anything. If a tool has import but no export, you're rebuilding the same trap.
Ideally, it works without an account — data on your own device can't be discontinued.

Migrating to Dashboard New Tab

Dashboard New Tab is a free, local-first new tab for Chrome that we built partly because of the Pocket shutdown. The migration takes about a minute: Settings → Import → Pocket → choose your ril_export.html or the CSV from the shutdown ZIP. Both vintages are parsed locally in your browser; unread and archive lists land as separate groups with tags preserved. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — there is no server to upload to.

After import you get what Pocket never had: instant search across everything (including your Instagram/TikTok/Reddit saves if you import those too), read-later queues, a “forgotten gem” resurfaced on every new tab, and one-click export to JSON or Markdown for Obsidian and Notion — so you are never locked in again.

If you missed the export window

The official window closed in October 2025, and Mozilla stated data would be deleted after that. Two partial recoveries are still worth trying: your email archive (Pocket digest emails contain links you saved), and your browser history if you read mostly on desktop. It's not everything, but a few hundred rediscovered links beat zero.

The broader lesson: saves you don't control aren't really yours. Local-first tools exist so the next shutdown is someone else's problem.