ArcVault

Your Arc library, liberated.

You save valuable things across Arc's Spaces, folders and favorites, but that library is hard to export, back up or move anywhere else. ArcVault turns it into portable data you own: JSON, CSV, Markdown, browser bookmarks, or a searchable offline page.

pipx install arcvault
arcvault export

Arc
 ├── Spaces
 ├── Folders (any depth)
 ├── Favorites
 ├── Saved tabs
 └── Auto-archive  (arcvault recover)
        ↓
     ArcVault
        ↓
 JSON · CSV · Markdown · Bookmarks · HTML library

Privacy: ArcVault reads browser data that may contain sensitive browsing information. By default, all processing happens locally. ArcVault doesn't collect telemetry or upload your browsing data, and it never writes to Arc's files. See docs/privacy.md.

What arcvault export gives you

Everything you intentionally saved in Arc's sidebar, across every Space:

• pinned tabs, and tabs inside folders and nested folders
• favorites
• your folder structure, as it is in Arc

All saved items are treated equally. Favorites, pinned tabs and folder tabs are just different places in Arc, not a ranking.

If you saved the same link in several places, ArcVault keeps every place. In the JSON and CSV it's one resource with a list of locations. In the Markdown, bookmarks and HTML library it appears in each folder where you saved it, under the URL and title you saved it with.

~/Documents/ArcVault/
├── arcvault.json     everything, losslessly: resources + all their locations
├── arcvault.csv      one row per link, for spreadsheets
├── arcvault.md       readable, organized by Space › Folder
├── bookmarks.html    Netscape bookmark file, the standard browser import format
└── library.html      offline page with search, filters and a folder tree

Each resource also gets an offline type (paper, video, repo, docs, course, PDF, …) and a topic. No API key is needed.

Recover auto-archived tabs

Arc archives Today tabs after a while, and closed tabs go to the archive as well. To get back anything that's no longer saved in your sidebar:

arcvault recover        # writes ~/Documents/ArcVault/recovered/

To include archived tabs in a normal export instead, use arcvault export --archive.

Organize by topic

arcvault organize           # shows your library grouped into topics
arcvault organize --write   # also writes a Markdown folder per topic

Topics come from keyword rules first. If nothing matches, the name of the folder you saved the link in becomes its topic, then its type (papers, courses, videos). Your own organization beats a guess.

You can configure the topics in ~/.config/arcvault/config.toml:

output = "~/Documents/ArcVault"

[organization]
categories = ["Artificial Intelligence", "Robotics", "Cooking"]

[organization.keywords]
Cooking = ["recipe", "baking", "sourdough"]

Install

Requires Python 3.11+ and macOS with Arc installed.

pipx install arcvault     # recommended: isolated install, `arcvault` on your PATH
pip install arcvault      # or with plain pip

No pipx? brew install pipx && pipx ensurepath.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/lexdumitrache/arcvault && cd arcvault
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e .
.venv/bin/arcvault export

What has been tested

If something is missing or looks wrong, run arcvault doctor, then arcvault inspect --sanitize > arc-structure.json, and attach that file to an issue. It contains structure only: URLs, titles and names are replaced with placeholders.

Advanced features

None of these are needed for normal use, and none run unless you ask for them.

Python API:

from arcvault import ArcVault

library = ArcVault.discover().scan()            # scan(archive=True) to include recovery data
for r in library.unique:
    print(r.title, r.url, [loc.label for loc in r.locations])
library.export("json", "arc.json")

How it works

ArcVault reads Arc's sidebar and archive files without modifying them. It turns every saved tab into a Resource, normalizes URLs conservatively (fragments and query strings are kept apart from known tracking parameters), and merges links that are the same while keeping every location. It then writes the exports. Arc's storage format is documented in docs/arc-data.md, and the code layout in docs/architecture.md.

Development

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest && .venv/bin/ruff check src tests && .venv/bin/mypy
ARCVAULT_REAL_ARC=1 .venv/bin/pytest tests/test_real_arc.py   # optional: invariants on your own Arc data

The tests use synthetic fixtures. Real browsing data never goes into the repository. See docs/contributing.md.

License

MIT