My bookmarks have disappeared!! 😢

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.