iOS 6 iCloud bookmarks sync stuck in limbo... any idea?

Having same issue. I thought I had a defective phone but checking the diagnostic & usage log showed 85+ webbookmarksd crashes. battery was depleting at nearly 20% per hour and since disabling safari icloud syncing and killing safari app its improved to about 2% per hour minimal use.

I also noticed my cellular data useage went from 120mb to 1.1gb over 2 days with iphone 5. Since disbaling safari icloud syncing my data useage has not moved in last 2 hours (other than nominal under 5mb that is expected with emails/imessage).

hoping for some sort of update fix as I don't want to set up as a new iphone for same reasons as you + don't want to lose my imessage history, I have run into occasions where I have needed to go back and check information...to prove a point lol..

I have now successfully restored my phone with an edited backup and removed the corrupted bookmarks.db!

I used iBackupBot, but followed these steps:

1) Did a full manual backup of my phone in iTunes (in it's crashy state). Then opened itunes backup folder and made 2 zipped copies of that backup elsewhere just in case.

2) Ran iBackupBot and extracted (with info) a clean bookmarks.db file from another backup of an iPhone 4S running IOS6 (not sure how important that it's the same model and IOS version.)

3) Switched to my 'bad' iTunes backup of my main phone with the corrupted 3MB bookmarks.db file and imported the 'clean' bookmarks.db file with the info file.

4) Used iBackupBot to 'restore' the edited backup to my iPhone.

5) iPhone restored, and rebooted. Then crashed. Stayed at a black screen. I put the iphone into restore mode holding the home button after releasing the power button while trying to force a restart. This time around the screen didn't even come on at all to show the 'connect to iTunes' icons whatever that's worth.

6) used iTunes to restore the iphone.

7) when the restore completed the iPhone stayed off, I manually turned it back on simply pressing hte power button once. It came up in iTunes. I used iTunes to 'restore the backup' onto the phone. I restored the same edited backup I had just restored using iBackupBot which 'crashed' the phone preventing normal booting, but this time via iTunes interface.

8) phone backup restored OK and the phone rebooted with all my settings back. iTunes saw the phone, recognized it and started to automatically sync and restore all my music, videos, applications, folders, etc.

For some reason after restoring and resetting this phone about 10 times in the last 24 hours, I think it was important that I follow this 'double restore' process. For some reason it seems the edited backups from iBackupBot only succeed after a full restore of the OS. I also think it was important that I keep the backup in the iTunes backup folder and only edit it with iBackupBot to ensure iTunes still recognizes the phone as a previously synced device (something I didn't do yesterday, and thought would cause me to have to re-sync all the apps manually and re-organize all the folders from memory).

I'll continue to monitor the battery life, processing and other options closely over the next few days. But it would appear I did find a (albet convoluted) process for doing a 'selective restore' of an IOS backup without resorting to jailbreaking the device. Now I just have to be very careful to cleanup on all my devices and fully backup BEFORE re-enabling icloud bookmark sync!

Wow. That is terrific. I ran into the same crash that you did, but never would've thought of doing a second restore on top of the first one. Well done.

Any way that you could send me a copy of the bookmarks file? If you don't want to make it publicly available for download, feel free to be in touch with me on Twitter @technorav. I don't have another similar phone to get a bookmark file from, but would be very happy to test the bug fix for others' benefit, and of course for my own as well.

Kudos once again.

I can't post the one I used as it was from a corporate employee's phone I had on my laptop from a phone swap I had done earlier in the day; but I can make a new empty one and post that. We have plenty of spare phones sitting around work right now as a lot of iPhone 5 swaps are occuring. I'll try to get something posted up online during the day tomorrow.

I did almost the exact same thing as yourself and bookmark file was cut down from 15047 to 180 approximately 9mb to start. I didn't have any crashes but I restored from itunes with the modified backup. Did not run into any issues and all files settings are in tact.

1hr 10mins on standy and checked battery... 100%

yesterday I was down to 60% after that long.

Also I don't think you can just change the bookmark file. Tried that and was getting a "corrupt backup" error and phone wouldn't restore.

I have the exported bookmark.db file as well as bookmark.db.info file if anyone needs them. As far as I know they are empty.

I restored iphone as a newphone with ios6 and then created a backup. exported the bookmark.db and bookmark.db.info files.

send me a message and I can email them. sizes are 74kb for .db and 45bytes for .info

FINALLY!!! big thanks to Shawn, ibackupbot and your directions made my day lol

That would be great. If you're on Twitter follow me @technorav, and when I follow you back, I can email you an address to send them.

If you can put them in a Dropbox folder and share a link in this forum, or in Cloud (www.getcloudapp.com), that would work too - just don't want to post an email address publicly here, and I don't see a way to send private messages.

Many thanks!

Incidentally, I have started posting in other "iPhone 5/iOs 6 battery" life threads to refer people here...

I will try and upload them asap to dropbox.

Link to files

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o8nueh3s5kwkjq8/MkOM4s1QaF

these files are from a fresh ios6 install and backup

If you don't know what to do with them and have not figured it out after reading this thread then I would recommend not using them.

you will need ibackupbot to import these files to your existing backup. My exact method was:

backup iphone 4 ios5

restore to iphone 5

backup iphone5 with ios 6

then I replaced the files in the iphone5 backup with the ones from the fresh ios6 backup.

Full charge at 12:15am

Listening to music since 8am. Normal use

Battery 83%

Usage: 1hr, 37min

Standby: 8hr, 46min

Good Luck!

SOO glad I found this thread. The above basically fixed my biggest issue. I was getting the same battery drain and bookmarks problem and could not get rid of it even after a couple of restores, restore as new phone, restore from iCloud, several hard resets, etc... Even with iCloud bookmark sync off if I opened safari I would get multiple errors in the log, battery would drain and phone got warm.

All I did was backup my buggy iPhone 5 ios6 in tunes. Used ibackupbot as above to import the empty "clean" bookmark file as above and then restored from that backup in iTunes and it worked well. Even turned back on iCloud syncing and my bookmarks came back just fine and so far no errors in the log.

Before I restored I did go through my bookmarks on my iPad 2 and clean up some duplicates and weird entries and seemed to pop up during this whole time.

Other than a brief cold sweat when my i4 black-screened, this worked just as decribed. Thank you everyone!

For others trying this, be aware that iBackupBot uses the "import" function to replace the bookmark files. You then have to export the entire modified backup file and put it where iTunes can find it, in your user Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/Backup folder. Take note of the exact time so you can find it later using iTunes' Restore function.

A quick test after the restore to see if you grabbed the correct backup file is to check for Safari bookmarks on your phone -- there should not be any, just an empty Reader List (assuming you used the files kindly provided above). Another is to open Safari and go to a web page, then close it and check your Diagnostics & Usage log to see if it is still showing =new= webbookmarksd errors.

One strange artifact for me: iTunes still has the option to sync bookmarks manually grayed out, claiming they are set to sync over the air using Mobile Me (?). I have shut off all bookmark syncing on all devices and in iCloud, but this message persists. This may be further evidence of the problem and hopefully will be fixed soon by Apple.

Too soon to say if it cured the iOS 6 battery drain, but it seems to me that the constant bookmark sync attempts are a likely culprit.

-dan

Quick update. It's been over an hour (which when I first udpated would have been about a 10% battery drain) and battery is still at 100% and no new webbookmarksd errors.

-dan

I'm having the same problem and I want to try the iBackupBot solution to edit the backup. I have iBackupBot, downloaded the two bookmark files from the dropbox location, and now I'm stuck because when I access my backup using iBackupBot, I only see the bookmarks.db file. I do not see a bookmarks.db.info file at all.

How do you actually import the fresh bookmarks.db file into your backup using iBackupBot? Is my problem related to me using the Trial Version of iBackupBot?

As I wrote above:

For others trying this, be aware that iBackupBot uses the "import" function to replace the bookmark files. You then have to export the entire modified backup file and put it where iTunes can find it, in your user Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/Backup folder. Take note of the exact time so you can find it later using iTunes' Restore function.

Make sure the two files are in the same directory (I had them both on my desktop) and then import the info file. This will replace the db file (yes this is confusing). Save the whole backup and put it where iTunes can find it and restore your phone.

-dan