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

I have exactly the same problem but my battery is also draining very fast since I upgraded to ios6. Could it be that Safari is trying to download the reading list and that is what is draining the battery?

I am having exactly the same issue, on an iPhone 4S rather than an iPad. I also ahve the webbookmarksd crashlogs and the LowMemoryAlerts.

I am finding that webbookmarksd does not launch until the first time after restarting the iPhone that you run Safari. Battery life is great, all is well with the world for many hours. But 1 Safari launch, and the crashing starts all over again, and with it the battery drain.

My interim workaround is to use Chrome, but I would really like Apple to fix this, or at least give me a way to blow away the iCloud copy of my Safari bookmarks and start over.

I am quite sure that the webbookmarksd daemon does not get launched when the device starts up - it only does so when Safari is launched. I have confirmed this using the System Stats app (which is crashy under iOS 6 when viewing the system log, but does let you view the running processes like Activity Monitor. Can't kill them, though.

The process is absent as long as Safari is not run. Once it's run, the process starts up, but never runs for more than a couple of minutes before dying and launching a new one.

I just tried the iTunes bookmark overwriting now, and got a nasty error message: "iTunes could not sync bookmarks to the iPhone "Mike's iPhone" because the iPhone canceled the sync."

I bet there is a lockfile in place from when the daemon died that is preventing the sync from happening - it thinks that there is a network sync going on still.

Just ran XCode while my iPhone was connected by USB, so I could see the console logs. Webbookmarksd was apparently turned on by the attempted Safari sync.

Here's some of what I'm seeing:

Sep 24 08:47:42 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1358]) <Notice>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Idle-exit job was jettisoned while dirty. Will respawn.

Sep 24 08:47:42 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1358]) <Notice>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Exited: Killed: 9

Sep 24 08:47:42 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) <Notice>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Sep 24 08:47:42 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1371] <Error>: libMobileGestalt copySystemVersionDictionaryValue: Could not lookup ReleaseType from system version dictionary

Sep 24 08:47:42 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1371] <Notice>: Saved crashreport to /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/LowMemory-2012-09-24-084742.plist using uid: 0 gid: 0, synthetic_euid: 0 egid: 0

Sep 24 08:47:49 Michael-iPhone backboardd[52] <Notice>: ALS: SetDisplayFactor: factor=0.0500

Sep 24 08:47:53 Michael-iPhone kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[1373] Builtin profile: webbookmarksd (sandbox)

Sep 24 08:47:54 Michael-iPhone webbookmarksd[1373] <Notice>: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_MEMORYSTATUS] add: "Operation not permitted" - 0x1

....

Sep 24 09:03:29 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1451] <Notice>: Formulating crash report for process webbookmarksd[1447]

Sep 24 09:03:29 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1447]) <Notice>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Idle-exit job exited while dirty. Will respawn.

Sep 24 09:03:29 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1447]) <Warning>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault: 11

Sep 24 09:03:29 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1451] <Error>: libMobileGestalt copySystemVersionDictionaryValue: Could not lookup ReleaseType from system version dictionary

Sep 24 09:03:29 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1451] <Notice>: Saved crashreport to /var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/webbookmarksd_2012-09-24-090329_Michael- iPhone.plist using uid: 0 gid: 0, synthetic_euid: 501 egid: 0

Sep 24 09:03:30 Michael-iPhone kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[1452] Builtin profile: webbookmarksd (sandbox)

Sep 24 09:03:30 Michael-iPhone webbookmarksd[1452] <Notice>: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_MEMORYSTATUS] add: "Operation not permitted" - 0x1

Sep 24 09:03:38 Michael-iPhone profiled[1448] <Notice>: (Note ) profiled: Idled.

Sep 24 09:03:38 Michael-iPhone profiled[1448] <Notice>: (Note ) profiled: Service stopping.

Sep 24 09:04:40 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1454] <Notice>: Formulating crash report for process webbookmarksd[1452]

Sep 24 09:04:40 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1454] <Error>: libMobileGestalt copySystemVersionDictionaryValue: Could not lookup ReleaseType from system version dictionary

Sep 24 09:04:40 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1452]) <Notice>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Idle-exit job exited while dirty. Will respawn.

Sep 24 09:04:40 Michael-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd[1452]) <Warning>: (com.apple.WebBookmarks.webbookmarksd) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault: 11

Sep 24 09:04:40 Michael-iPhone ReportCrash[1454] <Notice>: Saved crashreport to /var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/webbookmarksd_2012-09-24-090440_Michael- iPhone.plist using uid: 0 gid: 0, synthetic_euid: 501 egid: 0

Sep 24 09:04:41 Michael-iPhone kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[1455] Builtin profile: webbookmarksd (sandbox)

Sep 24 09:04:41 Michael-iPhone webbookmarksd[1455] <Notice>: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_MEMORYSTATUS] add: "Operation not permitted" - 0x1

I am wondering what happens if I remove the iCloud account from this phone completely. May try that next...

Ah,, I had missed the fact that you had deleted the iCloud account completely from your device. I had thought that you had simply disabled bookmark syncing in Safari, not the whole account.

I bet you're right that deleting the iCloud account will not fix the Safari problem. It's making me think that my only alternative is to set up my phone as a new device, then restore from iCloud backup. (Looks like the iCloud version of my bookmarks is OK)

My reading list was very short, but I had a couple of thousand bookmarks including some pretty hairy JavaScript bookmarklets. One of those could be interacting with a bug in Safari's sync code.

Really annoying not to be able to restore from a local iTunes backup. I will have to see what will be missing before I decide to do it...

(Hmm, I wonder if it is possible to do a local iTunes backup and then edit it before restoring it? Hmmm)

Hmph. I tried editing the local backup with a tool called iBackupBot - all it appeared to do, on restoring, was brick my phone. I am now setting the phone up as new, and will see what happens now.

I was able to confirm that Library/Safari/Bookmarks.db might contain the problematic data - there is stuff in the "bookmarks" and "sync_data" tables that suggest a sync in progress.

Oh, well. I did an iCloud restore, foolishly, and the result was as expected - the bug is still there. I do not have time in the next few days to do a truly clean install of my phone, reinstall and reconfigure everything, etc. For now, I have disabled Safari in Settings, and am using Chrome - so far, so good, and battery life is terrific, better than 5.1.1. I will try to call Apple with a bug report later this week and let them know about my use case - I can even send them a copy of my bookmarks.db for debugging purposes.

I have this same bookmarks issue apparently. Interestingly I had a very similar and related bookmarks sync issue when I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to IOS 5 and Mac to Lion last year. I ended up tracking it down to an old folder in my bookmarks menu that was an import of an import of an import from my macs over the years from IE 5 on Mac OS 8! That folder displayed in safari on my computer as having a few thousand identical bookmarks with invalid URLs. At the time I was having issues with the syncing of icloud to my phone as well as with safari on my computer hanging up and using lots of CPU time for the bookmarks sync on both my phone and Mac! I ended up following a complex process to clear out icloud by turning everything on and off and always selecting to remove from device, and each time manually going into safari on the Mac and on the phone and deleting all the bookmarks each time. After I got everything 'empty' i turned icloud off on my Mac, then restored my safari bookmarks xml file from timemachine, and manually went through and deleted all old junk folders and dead bookmarks. Once that was all clear and much smaller (the bookmarks file went from 35MB to 300KB (yes MB), I re-enabled sync and everything has been OK unitl I upgraded to IOS6.

I've been noticing that battery life was very poor and at various time of the day I'd notice the phone was warm, even though it was just in my pocket not being used. I checked the diagnostic logs and see the same messages as above. Loe and behold my Safari bookmarks are unable to be deleted. I turned off sync on the phone for bookmarks and they didn't clear off the device. I can't even delete any individual bookmarks or folders from inside safari itself. It just does nothing when I press the delete button.

I also tried editing a backup using iBackupBot to replace the bookmarks.db file with another I got from my wife's iphone backup file, but that also bricked my phone (restored 'ok' but restarted the phone and it just turns off after the apple logo boot screen every time it's turned back on). I restored it, and then re-applied an un-edited backup to it, and I'm back where I started.

Interestingly the 'bad' bookmarks.db I extracted from my iTunes backup which isn't working is 2.7MB and doesn't load properly in SQLite browser. It's not seen as a valid database file. My Safari bookmarks XML file on the Mac that it was syncing with is only 300KB. For kicks I checked the 72KB bookmarks.db file I grabbed out of my Wife's iPhone backup. It opens in SQLite browser just fine and shows the table structure and all rows correctly, so the 3MB bookmarks.db file is definately corrupted. I just can't figure out a way to DELETE or reset it without wiping the WHOLE phone... very frustrating.

I spent a bunch more time playing with things, and I got iBackupBot to "partially successfully" restore (device booted) an edited backup where i had replaced the bookmarks.db file with another bookmarks.db from a different IOS 6 phone. I performed the restore inside of iBackupBot rather than via iTunes like I did the first time. This resulted in a booting restore, with all my 'settings' (SMS history, newly cleaned bookmarks, wallpaper, email accounts, etc) all restored correctly, however when connecting it to iTunes to 'sync' the rest of everything (music, apps, etc) iTunes refused to see the iphone as having been restored yet, and only provided 2 options: restore from backup or setup as new phone. Not wanting to lose all my app selections, folder organization, music/podcast selections, etc (hey I like to hold onto things! I'm in this mess partially because I have a safari bookmarks file from the mid-90's!) I just restored it from a backup of my phone from earlier tonight before I started messing with trying to fix it, so I'm just back to where I was last time: a corrupted bookmarks.db but all my settings and other data. I'll leave iCloud sync off for now and see if that fixes the battery issue without bookmark syncing crashing repeatedly.

Now that I know I can at least get that far though, I'll have to decide what to do next... Depending on how widespread this problem is (it doesnt' appear to be effecting all IOS 6 devices so it's probably unlikely Apple will end up fixing it -- I can imagine the Apple Store Genius will just recommend a clean wipe, as an IT Admin by day, I'd probably recommend the same thing to someone who came to me with this problem), thus I may eventually decide that I'll spend the time to start fresh and reload the apps and music that I want and resolve this bookmarks issue (hopefully) once and for all.

Looking back at my timemachine copies of my itunes backups (which unfortionately go back to aound the begining of the year...but after I fixed this issue the first time) the bookmarks.db file on my phone has been at least 2.7MB the entire time, which means that some level of this corruption has been there probably ever since I thought I cleaned it all out the first time!