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intitial sync between home and work pc messed up all bookmarks
Hey there, I really need some help With sync profiles. I want to sync 2 browsers with Firefox 3.5, one at work and one at office. The trick is, both PCs have different initial bookmarks sets. The work PC has some bookmarks which only belong to work, but also some "common" bookmarks the home PC should see. The home PC has home-only and common bookmarks, too.
Now here's what I did: I set up Xmarks on the work PC, created a new account and synched the bookmarks to the server. Then I logged into my account and created a home and a work profile, marked the appropriate checkboxes to sort the bookmarks into common, work and home bookmarks.
Then I installed xmarks on the home pc and did a merge operation with the home pc as base set. Now everything went wrong that could...the home PC got work-only bookmarks, the work pc got home-only bookmarks, some bookmarks were moved from one folder into a complete other folder, some bookmarks even disappeared completely when I did the next sync at work. I had to restore the very first bookmark backup to continoue working.
So what did I do wrong? How do I properly set up home and work profiles if I start with already having 2 different bookmark sets?
Thanks in advance :-)
Now here's what I did: I set up Xmarks on the work PC, created a new account and synched the bookmarks to the server. Then I logged into my account and created a home and a work profile, marked the appropriate checkboxes to sort the bookmarks into common, work and home bookmarks.
Then I installed xmarks on the home pc and did a merge operation with the home pc as base set. Now everything went wrong that could...the home PC got work-only bookmarks, the work pc got home-only bookmarks, some bookmarks were moved from one folder into a complete other folder, some bookmarks even disappeared completely when I did the next sync at work. I had to restore the very first bookmark backup to continoue working.
So what did I do wrong? How do I properly set up home and work profiles if I start with already having 2 different bookmark sets?
Thanks in advance :-)
I’m disappointed
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Inappropriate?This sounds like a sticky situation.
Have you looked at your data on my.xmarks.com? The view there should give you a good idea of what is actually stored on our servers. From there you might be able to use our Explore and Restore feature to roll back to previous revisions of your bookmarks - before things got messed up.
Give that a try and let us know how it goes.
Cheers
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Inappropriate?I had a similar problem... but the bookmarks from my work computer saved to my home pc... and the home pc bookmarks have disappeard. Help!
Oscar.
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?I had this problem as well and the read reviews of people that had similar problems. I don't know why bookmarks should move to completely different folders but they did for me too. I think there are some indexing problems with xmarks's algorithms. I'm going to try to rollback all changes to my very first sync, then delete all profiles but one, organize it the way I want, sync all computers to that set, create home and work profiles and define the differences and finally change the various computers to the appropriate profile and sync. I hope this works otherwise I'm not sure I can make xmarks work for me. This would be a bummer because I really like everything else about their system.
I’m perplexed.
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Inappropriate?No luck. From the testing that I have done it appears that xmarks is not designed to merge disparate sets of bookmarks. I think the way the service is designed is to do the following:
1. create a base set of bookmarks
2. create profiles
3. from the base set designate which are to be included in each profile
4. set the profiles on each of the machine and then sync
If you already have disparate sets, I would (and will) try the following:
1. create your base set of bookmarks (preferably from your largest set)
2. add the bookmarks from your other sets to these manually
3. sync and then create your profiles
4. set the profiles on each of the machines and sync to distribute the bookmarks
As an alternative to this you could just merge the sets of disparate bookmarks, then clean them up on one machine and sync to the server overwriting the server data. Then create your profiles, set each of the machines to the appropriate profile and sync each machine overwriting the local data. Whichever is easier.
This is a lot of work but it is the only way I can see to use this service. Hopefully, once this is done, future bookmarks added from whichever source machine will merge properly.
I made several attempts at syncing disparate sets of bookmarks from separate machines. It appears to work thusly:
Machine one has bookmark directories:
- apples
- b-boys
- caterpillars
Machine two has bookmark directories:
- watercolors
- x-rays
- yellow_things
- zebras
You sync machine one to the server and then the server has apples, bananas and caterpillars.
If you sync machine two to the server with the merge setting and you choose "Start with data on the server" setting you will have all the bookmarks from watercolors placed in apples, x-rays in b-boys, yellow_things in caterpillars and then folder for zebras with its contents will be added to the server. You will end up with folders for apples, b-boys, caterpillars and zebras instead of what one might expect which would be: apples, b-boys, caterpillars, watercolors, x-rays, yellow_things and zebras; all with their respective bookmarks in place.
Essentially, what xmarks has chosen to do is merge folders based on order and not name. It seams easy enough to correct this and/or make it a setting. Hopefully, that will be a feature in a future release. I'll see if it has bee suggested yet.
I’m under-impressed.
