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