Vivaldi sync and bookmarks over multiple computers
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Hi Guys,
I have vivaldi installed on about 4 or 5 computers through out my home, work and my folks home. I just enabled sync on them after not using it for a long time due to always find it creates a large lag and slowness. And when i enabled it now, it basically duplicated all the bookmarks from all my computers i guess and more it seems... perhaps happened multiple times every time i logged out and logged back in to sync. Anyway now my bookmarks file is 45Mbytes. Which i presume is why vivaldi slows down every now and then, how can i now fix this? Log into vivaldio account on the browser and clean it up at the source?
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@lonewolf77 Hello, you can refer to Deleted bookmarks keep returning or Multiple duplicates of bookmark folders. I hope you can find a solution there (I didn't read the conversations in detail so... fingers crossed for you
)In general, please use Search before posting. Thanks.
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I dont understand though, is this a standard expected issue? I use sync on chrome, firefox, waterfox and opera and i have never had issues with them. Does Vivaldi sync backup a lot more items and thats why it seems to always have issues for me?
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@lonewolf77 It's clearly a bug.
Consider that sync on Vivaldi is quite a "new" service and the company (Vivaldi) is smaller and with less resources than Mozilla, Google or Opera. This is more prone to happen if a snapshot is used (which is something between chrome beta/canary as stability).
Resetting remote data could help; How many bookmarks - about - do you have? (without duplication) -
@Hadden89 Sadly I am not sure how many now as the duplication has happened many times. I would say i probably had about maybe a few hundred or something no idea, possibly more
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Look for SuperSorter at Chrome Store.
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@lonewolf77 said in Vivaldi sync and bookmarks over multiple computers:
Hi Guys,
Anyway now my bookmarks file is 45Mbytes. Which i presume is why vivaldi slows down every now and then, how can i now fix this? Log into vivaldio account on the browser and clean it up at the source?
No, your computer is slow for another reason. My Bookmarks file is much larger than that, as is my Favicons & History files, my Top Sites file is well over 200 MB.
If you are getting duplicate bookmarks due to a sync error, removing them is extremely easy. I use Bookmarks clean up, available in the Chrome Store. I used to use SuperSorter, but it has a bunch of bugs and has been abandoned by the developer (no updates for over 6 years, poked his head into the support forum over a year ago saying he'd fix things, but really he was only there to get someone else's extension taken down because it was similar).
Bookmarks clean up doesn't rearrange bookmarks for you, but with Vivaldi that's not entirely necessary since you can change how to view them in the browser. For dealing with what you and I need it for, this a more reliable and trustworthy extension. I would not let SuperSorter touch my library without making sure I had multiple current backups saved. Anytime you are going to do an operation like this on your data you should make sure you have up-to-date backups, but with Bookmarks clean up I am using it to remove duplicates so frequently that I have grown to trust it.
I backup my bookmark library & profile regularly. The deduplication I frequently do has nothing to do with any bug or error, it comes from merging in marks from other sources. I will run a duplicate search & removal several times a day sometimes. I've used this tool when merging two bookmark libraries that had over 60,000 duplicates between them. It took a little bit of work, but I know that no data was lost, and no marks were pulled out of the tree structure and left unorganized. After doing that, I trust this extension. I don't backup every time I'm going to use it, but that's because I use it all the time, and I already have a very recent backup should there be an issue.
I post from my phone frequently, which likes to change "the" to "three". If you see three or similar, I probably meant "the". I use swipe, so typos can be totally unrelated words to what I intended. Knowing this should help you read through my typos.
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Just to follow up with a suggestion on how to fix your library. Here's what I would do.
Backup & Export Bookmarks Libraries, and Full Profile
First export your bookmarks from every instance of Vivaldi. This html file is the one that you are going to use later in this process to restore your library, so copy them to a network share or USB drive, whatever works.
Also, again for every instance, close down Vivaldi, and then copy the Bookmarks & Bookmarks.bak files into a safe location. Wherever you normally store your backups should be sufficient. Be sure to label them so you know which files came from what computer, rename or use folders.
Then you'll want to make sure you've got a backup of your entire profile. There is always a chance of losing data when doing things like this, even other parts of your profile besides bookmarks. Make sure you've got at least 2 current backups of your profile from each instance of Vivaldi, and any other profiles as well (if you have multiple profiles on any machine). Two backups means stored on different physical media, not just two copies in different folders on the same drive.
Reset the Bookmarks Libraries
Both local & remote libraries need to be deleted. On each Vivaldi instance, there are several ways to reset the local bookmarks library to nothing. You could delete the bookmarks & folders from within the browser (be sure to empty Trash if you do). You could also remove the Bookmarks & Bookmarks.bak files from your profile. Before doing that however, you may want to disable sync for bookmarks, as Vivaldi may rebuild your library when it sees it's damaged, I don't know.
After you've cleared out all the local libraries, you should be in state where all of your Vivaldi installations have no bookmarks or folders (except for the roots), but thr server still has a remote copy. Vivaldi has a button in Sync Settings to reset the remote profile. You probably only need to do this once from just one computer. That said, not knowing the implementation details for Vivaldi's sync & profile management, I might go ahead and click that button from every computer at this step in the process. That makes sure each instance of Vivaldi is aware the server profile got reset.
Turn Sync Back On
At this point, all local libraries and the remote library should all be empty. By turning on sync everywhere, and verifying that they have all connected and synchronized successfully, you can see if anything was missed or didn't get fully cleared.
Note that there have been some issues with Sync recently. A public beta of Vivaldi Android was published on the website and in the Play Store. The app was downloaded over 150,000 times (certainly more now), and I imagine most people enabled sync. That's what we've been waiting for - the ability to sync our desktop browser with our mobile devices. So the server has been under abnormally high load, and the synchronization code has also had an unusual amount of code changes to support a new product. This will all settle down in a little bit and both the code base and the server will return to their normal stability.
The recent instability around the sync feature, however, has made initial downloads of profile data take longer than they should. Because of that, at this point, I might pause here and let all the instances of Vivaldi remain connected to the sync server overnight. Then check each of them the next day to see if any bookmarks have returned. The important thing here is to have all libraries empty before rebuilding.
Merge All Exports into One Local Library
Before starting any imports, on whichever machine you'll be doing this work, turn off sync for bookmarks. You can leave the other sync options turned on. This is because we may have some duplicates to remove before pushing the library to the remote server. There is no reason to deal with inconsistent local & remote libraries when restoring the bookmarks.
Import each of the exported html files into Vivaldi. This won't create any duplicates, bookmarks that are the same in each file will be discarded automatically during the import. The only duplicates that will remain after all the files have been imported are ones that already existed in your libraries; including when there was a copy of the bookmark in one folder on one machine, and a copy in a different folder on another machine.
Now, you should have empty libraries everywhere, except for this one machine which has all of your bookmarks (with maybe some dupes). The other machines are connect to sync, but this one is not.
Remove Duplicate Bookmarks
Install the extension Bookmarks clean up, which is the one I mentioned previously that I use all the time for this. Click the button that appears in the extensions toolbar and it will launch a new tab and load its interface. Click the "Find duplicated bookmarks" button and it will generate a list of all bookmarks that have the same address (other fields are not compared). Duplicates are all grouped together with their folder displayed, and checkboxes to select which to delete. You can click the address and the folder, both will open in a new tab/page. To remove all copies of a bookmark, check the boxes for each copy and then click the trash on the upper right of the group.
The first thing I would do is click the button at the bottom for "Select in same folder". Then click the "Remove all selected" button. That will get rid of any dupes that are in the same folder, and worth doing before deduping the rest. The eye icon next to a folder's name will select all bookmarks in that folder that were found and displayed on this page (i.e. they are dupes). That's an easy way to remove a large number of dupes if you know want to remove all dupes that are contained in that folder, leaving the other copy in your library. Clicking the eye icon with a line through it removes the checks for all bookmarks in that folder. You can click on the title of the bookmark to put a check in the box, you don't have to click the actual checkbox.
Before deduping as described above, you might want to click the "Merge duplicate folders" button at the top. This merges folders with the same name that have the same parent. It won't merge fuzzy matches, nor will it merge exact matches that are inside different parent folders. If the results dialog says that some bookmarks were merged into the same folder, then you can do the "select in same folder" step again.
All deletions, both bookmarks and folders, are moved to the Trash, not permanently deleted. So you can restore them if you make a mistake, but since we're starting with a restoration process here, if you make a mistake, might as well blow away the library and start over.
Turn Sync Back On & Verify All Libraries
After you're satisfied with the state of the local library you just restored, turn sync back on. All the other machines should have sync turned on too. Wait will the library is uploaded to the server, and then downloaded by the other machines. This is a lot of data to do, so it may take some time before you see your library replicated everywhere. Verify that things look ok, and you're done.
Good luck man, let me know if you have any questions.
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@bonetone said in Vivaldi sync and bookmarks over multiple computers:
@lonewolf77 said in Vivaldi sync and bookmarks over multiple computers:
Hi Guys,
I use Bookmarks clean up, available in the Chrome Store. I used to use SuperSorter, but it has a bunch of bugs and has been abandoned by the developerI'll check.
Thank you. -
@bonetone Thanks for the info on those extensions, I had no clue there were extensions out there that could do that. A day before i saw your message, i had spent hours trawling through my bookmarks removing duplicates. I just used both extensions and saved a lot of time, although supersorter seemed / felt like vivaldi was hung but i think it was just processing the sheer amount of duplicated bookmarks. Have deleted more than 100K bookmarks of duplicates. .
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@lonewolf77 said in Vivaldi sync and bookmarks over multiple computers:
Have deleted more than 100K bookmarks of duplicates. .
Yeah, when I was merging all my bookmark collections from all my browsers on all my systems I did the same. There's no way I would have done that manually. This extension enabled me to finally have one authoritative bookmarks library, which I now keep in sync across the browsers in which I care to have them. I'm working on a bookmark manager in some available free time (going slower than I would like), but with Bookmarks clean up available I am not developing deduplication functionality, at least not until I get the other features I want working well, then I might.
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Ppafflick moved this topic from Vivaldi for Windows on
