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A group of bookmarks in a Bookmarkshelf which have the same normalized URL is said to form a duplicate group. BookMacster is able to find duplicate groups within a Bookmarkshelf and displays a list of them in the tab Reports ▸ Duplicates.
Note that some browser apps (for example, Google Bookmarks, Delicious, and Firefox) do not allow duplicate groups within your account. If you create within or, from BookMacster, export a new bookmark into one of these apps which creates a duplicate group with an existing bookmark, one of them (usually the existing one) will be immediately and silently deleted.
Because the process of finding duplicates needs to compare each of your bookmarks with every other bookmark, it can take quite a few seconds of intense computation when the number of bookmarks is large. (For example, if you have 1000 bookmarks, 1000 normalized URLs may need to be computed, and 1000 × 999 / 2 = 499,500 comparisons must be made.) Therefore, BookMacster does not always keep this report updated, and instead does so only when commanded to update the report.
To find duplicates and thus update the report, you may click in the menu Bookmarkshelf ▸ Find Duplicates,
or else click the hyperlink in the tab Reports ▸ Duplicates.
If these controls are disabled, that means that no change which could have added duplicates has occurred since the last such update, and therefore no update is necessary.
Deleting duplicate groups in response to changes is not as laborious as finding them, so BookMacster observes such changes and deletes defunct duplicate groups “on the fly”.
Although duplicate bookmarks are undesirable in general, you may wish to allow duplicates of certain bookmarks for easy access. BookMacster provides two mechanisms for you to do this.
Ignore Duplicates in different top-level Hard Folders is a checkbox in a Bookmarkshelf’s Settings ▸ General tab which is useful if you’d like to keep a few commonly-used bookmarks in one hard folder, for example the Bookmarks Bar, but also have duplicates in another hard folder such as the Bookmarks Menu. If this box is checked, Duplicate Groups which involve bookmarks in different Hard Folders are not reported.
Duplicate Allowed is an is an attribute which may be switched on in any bookmark. A bookmark so marked will never appear in a Duplicate Group. There are several ways to mark (or unmark) a bookmark with this attribute:
will set the Duplicate Allowed attribute of the selected bookmark(s).
Of course, the direct way to remove a duplicate group is to delete all of the bookmarks in it except one. You can do this in either the Main Content View or, as shown here, in Reports ▸ Duplicates…
But if you find yourself with more duplicate groups than you care to deal with individually, you can command BookMacster to Delete All duplicate groups…
If you click Delete All, BookMacster will step through each of the group and delete all except one in each.
Although this is fast, it may in some cases delete bookmarks whose name and/or location you would have preferred. It is undo-able, so you can experiment.
Tags of deleted bookmarks. If a deleted bookmarks has any tags, BookMacster adds its tags to the tags of its surviving bookmark in the group, so that no tags are lost in this process.
Which one will survive? For each group of less than 12 bookmarks, BookMacster decides which one which has the most information, according to the following algorithm:
For groups of 12 bookmarks or more, BookMacster simply chooses one at random and deletes the remainder. This is done to reduce the amount of time that it takes.
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