My bookmarks have disappeared!! 😢

neil_smithline

Three things happened roughly concurrently:

I upgraded to Vivaldi V7 on my Mac
I created a new profile and signed into start sync sync
I deleted my old profile
The sync service was down then came back up

When the sync service came back, all of my bookmarks were gone!!! They've been replaced by the default bookmarks. I've checked on other computers and apparently sync has now replaced all my bookmarks with the default bookmarks. I'm guessing there is some bug in figuring out which bookmark set is the newest in the face of a broken sync service when creating a new profile.

Right now I'm trying to dig up old devices that might have an old version of the bookmarks on them. (I'll have to go into airplane mode to prevent sync, export the bookmarks, re-enable networking, sync, and then import the bookmarks). Even if I manage to find an old device with an old copy of my bookmarks, it won't have the newest ones (ie: the ones I care about most).

Does anyone have any ideas if and how to get back my bookmarks?

mib2berlin

@neil_smithline
Hi, this is really a strange issue, sync work additive.
Sometimes I forget to delete the default bookmarks syncing a new system, then I have both, my old bookmarks and the default.
Are they maybe in the trash bin?
If you don't have a backup of a profile or a exported bookmark file you cant recover bookmarks, I fear.

Ayespy

@neil_smithline How did you log into sync with your new profile? Using your old profile credentials? Was your new profile already populated with your bookmarks? If not, you effectively deleted all your bookmarks and then propagated that deletion to all your other devices.

Look in one of the profiles on your other devices for the file Local/Vivaldi/User Data/bookmarks.bak. If it's substantially larger than your bookmarks file, it has your old bookmarks. Save it to a safe place. Port a copy of it to your new profile and rename it by removing the .bak extension. You can only do this if you remove or rename your existing bookmarks file. Now when you restart Vivaldi, the bookmarks will propagate to your other devices.

neil_smithline

@Ayespy said in My bookmarks have disappeared!! :

How did you log into sync with your new profile? Using your old profile credentials? Was your new profile already populated with your bookmarks? If not, you effectively deleted all your bookmarks and then propagated that deletion to all your other devices.

If I'm following you, there is a race condition when I create a new profile and enable sync. If I enable sync before the default bookmarks have populated, it will delete the synced bookmarks. I thought, as @mib2berlin said, bookmarks were additive and I'd end up with duplicates. I guess I'm confused.

That said, here's an ls from another computer

$ ls -l Book*
-rw-------@ 1 neil.smithline  staff    28K Oct 30 16:32:34 2024 Bookmarks
-rw-------@ 1 neil.smithline  staff    28K Oct 30 16:09:42 2024 Bookmarks.bak

So no joy there.

I did find a year-old version on an Android tablet that I no longer use. I put it into airplane mode before opening Vivaldi so that they are safe. Is there any way to extract those bookmarks? It keeps wanting me to enable network so it can sync and I can't seem to disable the sync or switch the sync accounts without the network being enabled. A catch-22.

And even if I get those, it is still a year old version

Thanks!

PS: I've also searched several devices and my cloud drives for bookmark*html files but haven't found any.

Ayespy

@neil_smithline If you sync the old tablet, it should actually add all of its bookmarks to the sync database. This is what ALWAYS happens when I sync a device that has not been synced for months. It has happened to the point where last week, I had to delete tens of thousands of bookmarks. But don't do it just yet. Let me see if there is a way to extract and save the bookmarks file on an android device.

Ayespy

@neil_smithline So I can't find a way to export or save off android Vivaldi bookmarks.
I can't even find the file on my device, plugged in to my desktop and with system and hidden files visible.

Zalex108

@neil_smithline

Hi!,
What OS is the affected one?

neil_smithline

@Zalex108 said in My bookmarks have disappeared!! :

What OS is the affected one?
The problem started on my Mac but it has synced to another Mac, Android, and iOS devices.

neil_smithline

@Ayespy said in My bookmarks have disappeared!! :

@neil_smithline If you sync the old tablet, it should actually add all of its bookmarks to the sync database. This is what ALWAYS happens when I sync a device that has not been synced for months.
So you are saying that it won't wipe them out? Because it has wiped out the bookmarks in the other browsers

Ayespy

@neil_smithline My experience has been that sync ADDS everything from a device that has not been synced in a long time. Treats it as a new device, and new devices get added.

I can guarantee nothing. I can only tell you my experience.

Zalex108

@neil_smithline

There's no TimeMachine either?
Or is the LS you've posted?

neil_smithline

There is no time machine as the data was backed up to the Vivaldi cloud - I figured it was safe

I did turn on the network on my old Android tablet then, before it was able to sync, logged out of my Vivaldi account. Once I did that I created a temp Vivaldi account on the Android and synced to it. I was then able to sync to this on my Mac, export the bookmarks, and import them into my main profile. So now I've only lost about a year's worth of bookmarks. Not a great situation but much better than losing many years worth of them.

This means that I never tested @Ayespy's theory on:

My experience has been that sync ADDS everything from a device that has not been synced in a long time

Which would have been interesting but I was too nervous to risk my bookmarks.

There was definitely a bug here. Whether it was a timing problem with the new profile, due to the sync server being down, or something else - my bookmarks got deleted without me deleting them. That's a bug. I just don't know how to report it because it is far from reproducible.

Thanks for your help everyone!!

Zalex108

@neil_smithline said in My bookmarks have disappeared!! :

There is no time machine as the data was backed up to the Vivaldi cloud - I figured it was safe

Unfortunately,
It is not a Backup, is just a Sync service.

"Important! "
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tools/sync/#:~:text=across multiple devices.-,Important!,-Sync is not

You will need to determine how to backup by yourself since now on.

Ayespy

@neil_smithline Unfortunately, there is no such thing as "backup to Vivaldi Cloud" Vivaldi does not have a cloud storing user data. Sync is a dynamic service, not static storage.

neil_smithline

I misspoke. It was backed up on all of my devices. So losing any one device would not have been a problem. It hadn't occurred to me that it could get corrupted on one device and then synced across all my devices.

The sync protects against a disk failure but not what happened to me

Ayespy

@neil_smithline It was not a corruption, I don't think. I think you synced an empty bookmarks file across all your devices. The clue was "new profile."

neil_smithline

Just want to thank you @Ayespy @mib2berlin @Zalex108. I appreciate the help.