groot wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 11:09pm:
Your English looks good on the screen, but probably like my Spanish – much easier to do output than input.

groot wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 11:09pm:
Correct.

groot wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 11:09pm:
Correct.

groot wrote on Sep 19^th, 2022 at 11:09pm:
BookMacster's syncing will work whenever the Mac is not sleeping.  Although Apple has been liberalizing the definition of sleep in recent macOS versions, I don't think sleep yet allows something like BookMacster's BkmxAgent (which does the syncing for us), and also it would need Brave, to work during sleep.  Safari's iCloud syncing may or may not work when the computer is sleeping; I don't know.  But Safari's iCloud syncing is handled by a background process, so it will occur even if Safari is not running.  The last time I looked t Brave, I did not see any background process.  So Brave Sync only works when Brave is running.  There are a half dozen or so Mac apps which supposedly prevent a Mac from sleeping.  I've never used any of them, so I cannot offer any testimony.  Here is the page for one of them on MacUpdate, and on the right side of the page is a list of similar apps.

Your original system might work as a modified Alternative #1 if only one BookMacster was active at a time, and if you allowed BookMacster and the browsers to run on Computer 1 and Computer 2 for a few minutes after making the last bookmark change.  In other words, since you can choose either Mac to be your "Bridge Mac", you could maybe have your work computer be the Bridge Mac while you are at work, put that one to sleep and then go home and your home computer becomes the Bridge Mac while you are at home.  I don't know, though.  Macs tend to wake up on their own at times (for example, there is, I think a Wake for network access checkbox in System Preferences (Settings in Ventura), so such an arrangement would be somewhat fragile at best.  Switching off internet access might be a good brute force solution to that    Then there is also the issue of how items' unique identifiers, which iCloud, Brave Sync and BookMacster use to identify items, would circulate through the system.  I would need more time to think about it and test, which I don't have at the moment.

So you see it gets really complicated, which is why I like to recommend just put BookMacster or Synkmark on one Mac only.  It will work, and you don't need to be an systems engineer to try and deduce all of the bad things that might happen.

Hello, Groat.

Thank you for contacting us.

Nice diagram - very easy to see the problem; you've created two sync loops.



A section in our Help Book explains how Sync Loops cause the problem you are seeing.  Yes, we need a better artist, but the idea is that those two guys are stepping on one another's work.

There are two correct ways to sync these devices, which we call Alternative 1 Bridge Mac and Alternative 2.  Each have advantages and disadvantages to each, again as explained in our Help Book, which you shoud read.

In your case, to implement something like our recommended Alternative 1, you would simply remove BookMacster from one of the Macs.  It would look like this:



Similarly, to implement something like our Alternative 2, you would switch off syncing in Safari and Brave on one of the computers.  One possible result:



A couple more things…

Most importantly, because of the current sync loop, your browsers are full of orphaned items, duplicates, etc.  So after you fix the sync loop, you must

• Switch off syncing in BookMacster.
• Clear out all items in all browsers.
• Reorganize and de-duplicate your bookmarks in BookMacster.

Please read some of the details of this procedure.

Finally, I should point out that your drawing shows that items flow from Computer 1, through iCloud Sync, then through iPhone, then through iCloud Sync again, then to Computer 2, and vice versa.  That is not quite correct.  In fact, all three devices connect  to iCloud, not to one another.  They are all "peers" in the system.  Similarly for Brave Sync.  You can see that in our diagrams which I linked to above.