If indeed you believe pinboards are stored on the user's device, as you appear to suggest, please tell us where.

Oh, also noted are the references to using Sync as a form of backup. Great idea, if only sync would work, but it refuses to. I posted about that a couple of months ago but no-one bothered to respond.

I wonder how many users have given up, exasperated with Opera because the marvellous features it offers, eg. pinboards and sync, are buggy, fragile, and time-wasting when the you have to spend hours trying to work around the flaws, to say nothing of the hours spent setting up pinboards only to have them wasted when they are arbitrarily deleted for no reason. These issues should have been dealt with years ago.

https://pinboard.opera.com/view/1

So no amount of backing up will enable the uiser to restore the actual pinboard if some miserable beggar with access to the server decides to delete what the link refers to. or if an error of some kind either breaks the links or corrupts or deletes the p[inboard.

The whole problem could be so easily overcome if they were stored on the user's computer instead of on Opera servers and only accessible via a link that's so easily broken. How hard could that be? Cookies are stored on the user's device, so why not do this with pinboards, then none of these stupid irritations would occur.

What I did learn is that pinboards are stored in the "bookmarks" file. On my ancient Win7 PC this is located at:

C:\Users\Playtech\AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Stable

This file seems to back itself up to bookmarks.bak in the same location, though my attempts to restore pinboards at that time were unsuccessful (like yourself, I'm just a button-pusher with no technical aptitude). However, both files are included in my daily backup routine.

The other thing I learned is that if Opera is set to delete cookies on exit it will also delete your pinboards. How stupid is that? Consequently i never delete cookies and they just accumulate—probably in the thousands now, and there's no way I can see to select which to delete and which to retain.

It's a crying shame that such a useful feature should be so vulnerable to unintended deletion without warning. Even after all this time pinboards are still shown as "beta", and it appears nothing has been or is being done to rectify the issue and make it more robust. This reminds me of the old English proverb about "spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar".

Sorry I can't be of more help. It would be good if someone who really understands these issues would contribute to the discussion.

My pinboard also disappeared, and it happened on October 15th at around 22:10 JST. I use two separate profiles, and I was trying out the pinboard feature with the second one since the beginning of this month. Despite not allowing cookies and using the GX Cleaner of OperaGX more than twice, my pinboard was fine for over 10 days. I restarted it multiple times and checked it, each time finding it secure, which made me relieved.

I knew it was a beta version and I did not use any external cleaning software, nor did I back it up. I didn’t use account synchronization or link sharing either. I understand my faults, and even knowing it was a beta version, I never expected it to disappear so easily. I thought that being in beta would only lead to minor display issues, text corruption, or disordered save sequences, but I accept that bugs are inevitable and I appreciate the effort of the developers who are working hard for us.

However, this was unexpected; it disappeared with just one restart. I have no idea which folder or file to back up from the Explorer’s user folder. I’m just an ordinary person with no technical knowledge and can’t do anything about it. I only managed to find a possible save location after discovering this forum. After realizing it was gone, I backed up all my user folders. If there’s a way to recover it, I would like to know. When I restored the tabs from the browser history, it stated that this pinboard was deleted, which saddened me deeply, as it was against my will.

I read that the pinboard information might be hidden in the bookmark file from this forum, so I tried it with a new profile, but I could only copy the bookmarks. I won’t give up hope; I am waiting for the developers to fix it so that my and everyone else's pinboard can be restored. I wish for the safety and recovery of all our pinboards.

I generated this text using chatGPT.

I restored my missing Pinboards by means of the procedure described below.

You must be signed in to your Opera account with Synchronization enabled. Go to Opera Settings - Synchronization - Advanced sync settings then checkmark Sync Everything

I think the latest version of CCleaner Pro wiped out my Opera Pinboards (from my PC cache). So, after restoring my Operal Pinboards, I went into CCLeaner Options - Cookies and found pinboard.opera.com and whitelisted that cookie.