Resetting Safari/iCloud bookmarks
My Safari bookmarks are pretty messed up—lots of duplicates, etc. I want to clean them up, but iCloud keeps setting them back to the messed up version.
I have followed a number of suggestions in the Discussions and the web which basically boil down to this:
1. Turn of iCloud on all devices, deleting info on iDevices.
2. Fix up all bookmarks on the mac the way you want them.
3. Export bookmarks (to save them).
4. Delete bookmarks.plist. This clears out all bookmarks in Safari, giving a clean slate.
5. Turn on iCloud for the Mac. Because there are no bookmarks in Safari, this should clean out the bookmarks on iCloud.
6. Reimport saved bookmarks into Safari. These will upload to iCloud.
7. Turn iDevices back on. Bookmarks should download from iCloud.
My problem seems to be step 5. Just before turning iCloud back on, my bookmarks are the Safari defaults (i.e., essentially empty). But when I turn on iCloud, instead of iCloud being cleaned out, all the old, unorganized bookmarks that were still on iCloud come back down and repopulate Safari, so I'm back to where I started.
Perhaps the problem is that I don't really understand the iCloud model. If iCloud and a device differ, which gets changed and which remains the same—iCloud or the device? In a way it makes sense that iCloud would download all its information to an empty iDevice; isn't this what you want if you somehow lost all the information on the device, that iCloud would restore it?
In any case, I need to set things up so that iCloud is set to the current state of my Mac's Safari, either with its default bookmarks or the set of fixed ones. Any suggestions on why the method above fails?