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Jerry Krinock
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #6 - Apr 25th, 2020 at 5:10pm
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Thank you for the follow-up, Lew.

I called Apple Support a few days ago (Wednesday 04/22) and was told that their engineers have acknowledge the issue with my iCloud Safari bookmarks but have not fixed it yet.  However, I don't think this is the issue you are having, although it may be related.  It is only so I can do some testing with iCloud and my iPad without too much work migrating stuff.

Regarding your latest finding, it appears now that the separators can also disappear when a new Mac account is added to your iCloud account, so this makes it less likely that iOS 13 is a culprit.  However when I tested this last week, adding a new Mac to my icloud account, I did not see any problem with separators.

As far as what is the culprit, certainly BookMacster is not deleting your separators, so I am not surprised at what happened.  My concern regards is that the way BookMacster represents separators in your bookmarks, using the URL scheme separator://, is raising some ire within iCloud.  I can't imagine how that could be, because separator:// is simply a custom URL scheme, and people have have used custom URL schemes in Safari and other browsers for many things for many years.  On the other hand, Apple does not document anywhere that custom URL schemes are OK.

I guess you should send us your BookMacster Collection (.bmco file) if you don't mind, and I shall have a look at those separators to see if there are any surprises.  The .bmco file is actually a package, so you should email a zip archive of it.  If you can remember some which were deleted by iCloud and not deleted by iCloud and tell me, that would be great.
  

Jerry Krinock
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Lew
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #5 - Apr 22nd, 2020 at 1:38pm
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I'm currently running BookMacster v2.10.22 and MacOS v10.15.4.

Since my original post, syncing has been functioning fine with no loss of bookmarks.  However, something interesting happened yesterday when I installed Catalina v10.15.4 on a new thumb drive to use as a boot drive in the event my MacBook Pro experienced issues.

After installation, I checked Safari's newly populated bookmarks.  They were imported with very few separators...many less than there should have been.  I then checked my iOS devices and their bookmarks appeared the same as on the thumb drive.

I shut down the thumb drive session and booted the MacBook Pro from its internal drive and opened BookMacster immediately.    Bookmarks along with separators were as I left them, so I did an Export to all.  Bookmarks on my iOS devices synced and returned to their previous state.  I have not as yet booted from the thumb drive.

So, with BookMacster out of the loop, it appears iCloud is the culprit in messing up the separators.  Hopefully, Apple will report back to you with a fix.
  
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Jerry Krinock
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #4 - Apr 17th, 2020 at 3:53pm
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We are still waiting for Apple's iCloud Engineering team to fix my iCloud.

As you may know, Safari has never supported separators, and we have always "faked" them in various ways.  In early 2019, after we saw some issues with Safari 12.1, we changed our faking style in BookMacster 2.9.9 so that separators' URLs would be "separator://<jibberish>" instead of no characters, and this fixed those issues.  Just to make sure, you do have the current version of BookMacster, 2.10.x or later, yes?

I did, however test this on another iCloud account, between two Macs.  I synced several bookmarks changes through iCloud.  It worked, and no BookMacster-generated separators were deleted.  So I wonder if it may be iOS 13 which is deleting them.  I presume your iPhone and iPad Pro are running iOS 13?
  

Jerry Krinock
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Jerry Krinock
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #3 - Apr 10th, 2020 at 9:46pm
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Well, I finally got escalated up to a Senior Advisor in Apple Support, who agreed that it is a server issue, and has sent a request to their iCloud operations department to fix my iCloud bookmarks.

If they perform as expected, I should be able to test this separator issue by the middle of next week.
  

Jerry Krinock
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Jerry Krinock
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #2 - Apr 9th, 2020 at 11:35pm
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Update: Of course, to reproduce this issue, I need working iCloud Bookmarks.  But my own iCloud Bookmarks has been totally broken for the last couple months – so bad that even our famous rebuild iCloud bookmarks procedure does not fix it.

I have opened a support case with Apple, and we are working on it.
  

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Jerry Krinock
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Re: Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Reply #1 - Apr 4th, 2020 at 5:12am
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I shall try to reproduce this issue during the next few days.
  

Jerry Krinock
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Lew
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Separators Deleted When Mobile Safari Syncs
Apr 3rd, 2020 at 6:19pm
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Hello Jerry...

I'm using a 2018 MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.15.4 and Bookmackster 2.10.18.  The issue I am experiencing has been happening for quite a long time...over many versions of MacOS and BookMacster.

I have a few bookmark separators that sync just fine with Firefox and Chrome and their respective iOS browsers.  The issue I am experiencing is when bookmarks sync between Safari for MacOS and Mobile Safari on my iPhone and iPad Pro.

At least once a day I notice a number of the separators have disappeared.  It's an easy enough fix...deleting the bmco file and replacing it with a backup, but the procedure it getting old.

I'm hoping there's a setting that isn't correct.  Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you...

Lew
  
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