Reset Safari Bookmarks in iCloud

12 Comments

  1. Peter

    Thanks for a great post!

    The step where you manually delta all duplicated bookmarks is all good if you have a few dozen duplicates. I had thousand and thousands of duplicates, some even triplicates. The trick I used was to find the app called Safari Prairiefire. It was $6 and it found all duplicates and allowed me to delete them easily. Of course, it doesn\’t take care of syncing etc but at least it made it easy to clean up the bookmarks list.

  2. InternetMarketingTools

    I had the same problem due to years of upgrading, using Xmarks (previously FoxMarks), multiple computers (Mac and PC., and generally just bookmarking way too many things.

    This is how I fixed my issue:
    my.xmarks.com -> Tools -> Duplicate Bookmarks

    Then, as your instructions keep 1 master copy (On my Mac), and delete everything else everywhere.
    (Thanks for the post 🙂

    Lastly I\’d like to add:
    Preventing Bookmark Overload:
    Tip 1: Only Bookmark if it is an ONLINE TOOL
    Tip 2: If it is INFORMATION on the page that you need for future reference paste it to EVERNOTE
    (This way the information will be at your disposal, even if the website goes down…)

    So, in a couple of years we\’ll see a post on how to delete duplicates in evernote..
    🙂

    1. Thanks for the tips on preventing bookmark overload. I especially like #2 about Evernote. I keep my Evernote system pretty clean – deleting information once I no longer need it. I can see how it can get overloaded as well though 🙂 – Thanks for your comments.

  3. Wendy

    Thank you, thank you, thank you (and that is the only thing that is duplicated now).

  4. Gabri

    Thank you! This solved my problem. 🙂

  5. Mark A. York

    Unfortunately for me ,all of my backups have the bookmarks.plist hidden. I can\’t change that in the backup files, only in my current version where I can see the short bookmarks left after the big erase. The bookmarks are gone. Thanks Apple.

    1. Sadie

      If you deleted your bookmark and don\’t have itunes backup, you may try iphone data recovery tool. Which can recover the bookmars by scanning your device. And it can also retrieve data from iCloud backup file.

  6. Jessica Lane

    Yesterday, (Aug 3th), the bookmarks on my iPhone 4 were fine. This morning they were gone. I rebooted the phone at around noon PST, and the bookmarks were still gone. I rebooted again just now, (1:00PM PST), and my bookmarks are back. I made no other changes of any kind yesterday or today. Hope this helps.

  7. wróżka londyn

    Thanks for every other wonderful article. Where else
    could anybody get that kind of info in such a
    perfect approach of writing? I have a presentation subsequent week, and I am on the search for such
    information.

    1. Oh cool. A presentation on removing bookmarks from iCloud. Bet you pack the house!

  8. Kelly

    I’ve gone through this process 3 times and iCloud is officially destroyed my ability to use Safari. Now that I’ve managed to purge bookmarks from Safari in iCloud, it continually overrides my mac os x safari no matter how many times I sign out of iCloud safari & merge my restored bookmarks. Every time I repair my Safari bookmarks then sign back into iCloud, agree to merge, iCloud wipes out my bookmarks again. Toast. Now I have to switch to a new browser. Since iCloud already destroyed my Reminders sync ability when they upgraded without warning, Safari was the only reason i had left to use the Apple ecosystem. Now it’s done. My next device will be NOT apple.

    1. Hi Kelly,
      Sorry you’re having such trouble with iCloud. Given that this post is pushing 10 years old, I can’t guarantee any of the techniques work. I can suggest that you make sure your bookmarks are cleared across all devices, but you’ve probably tried that. Best of luck with which ever platform you migrate to. Let us know if it works better 🙂

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