Problem with ipad duplicating all my bookmarks

[Jockscrap]

Have an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2, and up until today the bookmarks between them have synced perfectly. For some reason now, all my bookmarks are duplicated. I've tried a reset and that hasn't worked. I've also tried switching icloud bookmarks off , deleted them from the devices, then switchedd back on again with no success. Any ideas why this is happening and what I can do about it?

 

[twerppoet]

Are they duplicated on both the iPhone and iPad?

If so you are probably doomed to edit them manually. No idea why they duplicated, but if they are showing up on both devices duplicated then they are already duplicated in iCloud as well. There is no way to edit them in iCloud, so you are left with doing the work on one of the devices (or computer) that they sync with.

If they are only duplicated on the one device, then try logging completely out of iCloud on that device (saying yes to deleting local content), then sign back in.

 

[Jockscrap]

Hi, yes. Duplicated on both devices. I thought I'd try and be clever, so I deleted the duplicates from my iPad and iPhone having turned both iPhone and iPad to airplane mode. Then I manually did an iCloud backup of the iPad thinking the new trimmed down bookmarks would be saved to the cloud. However, once the backup was completed, all my bookmarks had vanished, but were still on my IPhone. I ended up plugging my iPad in to my pc, and getting my bookmarks back from Internet explorer, minus the few I'd built up over the past year I've had my iPad.

 

[twerppoet]

Sorry you had so much trouble.

The backups and syncing are separate processes, and store the info in different places. This is probably a good thing. If you had completely erases you bookmarks after the backup, you could have restored from backup to get them back. Though in this case you would have gotten them back doubled, just the way you backed them up.

Next time you have to delete duplicates do it with iCloud active, and your changes should get copied to iCloud, and then to the other devices.
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[Jockscrap]

Great tips, thank you. Bit weird how these things can trundle along working perfectly for ages then suddenly start playing up, but good to know how to deal with it better the next time if it happens again.