Collections vs Bookmarks?

Question

Level 4

2,986 points

Collections vs Bookmarks?

In the Safari (for OS X) bookmarks management window, in the sidebar, there is a section for "Collections" and a section for "Bookmarks."

There are THREE entries for the bookmarks bar.

Which is the "real" one?

Why are there two BookmarksBar entries in the BOOKMARKS section?

What is the difference between something listed in the COLLECTIONS section and the BOOKMARKS section?

Something looks spurious here.

This morning, my bookmarks bar started acting weirdly on one computer. On the bookmarks bar, I have a folders, most of which contain many more bookmarks. In each of those folders there are also subfiolders. When I went to any subfolder anywhere, it was empty

yet the bookmarks were in the two folders in the BOOKMARKS section but NOT in the one in the COLLECTIONS section. An export of the bookmarks showed me that those links were still there, they were just inaccessbile from the regular bookmarks bar.

After about 2 hours, they all returned. Since I have several instances of Safari syncing via iCloud, the missing bookmarks, which had been there last night, likely came back from the cloud. None of other computers, iDevices, or VM's did this, they all acted normally.

This has me stumped. I have done quite a bit of Google searching on how the bookmarks management window is supposed to work, but nobody shows me both BOOKMARKS and COLLECTIONS nor describes the differences between them.

Based on the dissappearance of the contents of the subfolders from the bookmarks bar along the top of a Safari window and the contents of the BookmarksBar in COLLECTIONS, I gather that the one in COLLECTIONS is the "real" one. Yet this one does NOT seem to be the one that syncs via iCloud.

I do know that if I import bookmarks, they appear in the BOOKMARKS section. Also, based on a mess up I made in Windows Safari, I managed to nuke all my bookmarks in the cloud by deleting something in the BOOKMARKS section. This wiped all the bookmarks off of 11 instances of Safari for OS X (two in VMs), Safari for Windows (all in VMs) and one instance of Mobile Safari. I did have an exported backup so that when the deletion finally propogated to all systems and all my bookmarks were gone, I was able to reimport to one system and they all crawled back.

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Sep 29, 2012 6:18 PM

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Answer 1

moebelli

Level 1

1 points

Oct 2, 2012 12:23 PM in response to GW Schreyer

You summed up my confusion and frustrations as well.

I have no idea what all that means either. Can anything be more confusing than trying to sync your Safari bookmarks between devices and computers.

I've tried to figure bookmark syncing now for months and still don't understand it. Bookmarks I create disappear, iPhone bookmarks never match what I have on my iPad, my MacBook Air is different from my iMac.

Honestly, I've given up and finally turned bookmark sync on iCloud off and manually do bookmarks for all my Macs.

I might go back to using Chrome, where bookmark sync is flawless.

Why isn't there an iCloud category for bookmarks, that shows you all your bookmarks that get downloaded and acts like a master file, instead of the merge window that appears quite often.

If anyone can explain how this is all supposed to work and successfully can sync bookmarks, I'd really like to know how you do it.

Apple who prides in simplicity has created the most difficult bookmark sync service I have ever used.

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Answer 2

GW Schreyer Author

Level 4

2,986 points

Oct 2, 2012 4:06 PM in response to moebelli

I've never used another one, but this one doesn't work all that well. I have BR'd the whole thing and ER'd the concept of a bookmark editor in the cloud a while ago. Still, nada.

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Answer 3

GW Schreyer Author

Level 4

2,986 points

Oct 4, 2012 12:26 PM in response to GW Schreyer

Ok, more data.

I had a clean set of bookmarks in the regular Safari bookmarks bar in the toolbar. I also had these folders in the bookmarks editor

COLLECTIONS > Bookmarks Bar

BOOKMARKS > BookmarksBar

I edited some bookmarks and I found that the one in COLLECTIONS changed. This also propagated to another ML Mac, to iOS and to a Windows 7 VM. So far, so good. The two folders in the BOOKMARKS section were not updated with the new data so they appeared to be redundant.

I exported my bookmarks again and then nuked the three folders in the BOOKMARKS section. All appeared to be good.

Then I fired up the Windows 7 VM again and the BOOKMARKS section vanished and then returned without the duplicate BookmarksBar folder. However, the REAL bookmarks vanished from the VM, from both ML machines. They did not vanish from iOS.

It appears that the BOOKMARKS section is there to support Windows. The BookmarksBar folder that was created there had the most recent version of my bookmarks in all systems except iOS, which has two copies of each of the Bookmarks Menu and Bookmarks Bar folders at the top level of it's Bookmarks menu. Three of them are empty, one has the correct set of bookmarks.

Safari was less than usuable with no bookmarks, so on ML, I selected all the bookmarks that were in the BOOKMARKS > BookmarksBar folder and dragged them to the Safari toolbar where 400 of them copied back to the bookmarks bar. Now they were in COLLECTIONS > Bookmarks Bar and not in BOOKMARKS > BookmarksBar. This change propagated through the cloud and repopulated the toolbar bookmarks bar on all systems. iOS bookmarks went blank for a few seconds and then repopulated as described in the last paragraph.

Something is broken here. Windows and the Mac are not getting allong all that well.

The last time I nuked all my cloud based bookmarks was after deleting a bunch of stuff in the BOOKMARKS section of the bookmarks editor. It would appear that a BookmarksBar folder is necessary there but redundant on the Mac side.

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