New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…

Original story (published on May 13, 2019) follows:

You know, there are tons of ways to judge a complete stranger. No need to jump into an advanced course of behavioral science, but if you can sneak in and take a look into his/her browsing history – voila! You just crossed the first major hurdle.

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Image source: Roxy

Well well well, browser bookmarks can also be treated as an excellent source of information about the knack or instinct of a person. You can often find years old to do task saved as a bookmark, which is an ideal example of sluggishness in the world of internet. ?

Thanks to the modern internet, your bookmarks are not tied with one device. Most of the modern browsers give users the ability to organize and sync bookmarks across devices via some kind of online accounts.

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Google Chrome bookmarks sync via Google Account 

Now imagine a situation: you open your laptop in one fine morning, fire up Chrome and notice that the Bookmarks bar is completely empty! Sounds like worthy plot of a techno-horror movie, but several Chrome users have actually faced this weird glitch.

Opened chrome today and went to click on one of my bookmarks. Before I could, all but 2 of them disappeared… Have not signed on to any other computers or devices recently (several weeks or months). Searched for backups and all trouble shooting I could find online to no avail. Any ideas why this might of happened? Or how to get them back? Lost 50 plus that I use on a regular basis and have built up over many years. Using windows 10 and latest version of Chrome.

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Thank you but I understand how synching works. The issue was that after a Chrome update today, all my bookmarks were erased, I was logged out of my accounts and all the cookies gone. And because I do not synch my profile everything is gone, gone.

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The time frame of this sudden spike of auto-deletion bookmarks ranges from mid-March to the present, which is inline with the release of v73 and v74 update on the stable channel of Google Chrome.

Affected users even started a thread under Google Chrome support forums, which is getting populated day by day. However, no official statement is available at the time of writing this article.

I have reviewed prior questions regarding similar issues. None are helpful. My folder disappeared for no reason. I did not install an update. I did not delete it. All of a sudden, it was gone. I cannot find the folder in Bookmark manager. My other bookmarks are still available. Only one folder (my most used) disappeared. How can I restore this folder?

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I also lost all my Chrome history and bookmarks without any sign of any updates done on my Windows 10 Laptop. There is no files for Chrome in the User Application Data directory so no recovery possible from that end. Are these files stored somewhere on a Google server? Can they be recovered?

I find it appalling that there is no response, explanation or apology by the Chrome support teams.

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People have tried the usual ways like finding the Bookmarks.bak file or use Google Takeout to dump the last proper synced bookmarks using tools like this one, but the recent most entries couldn’t be recovered. Looks like Google somehow mangled the syncing part of the bookmarks storage.

The bug is not limited to PC users, as apparently Android users are affected as well.

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We are able to locate a bug report under Chromium bug tracker expressing partially similar symptoms. However, the user was able to get most of the bookmarks via a forceful sync but stumbled on duplicate entries.

I have two PC with Chrome Dev and Chrome Canary on each + an Android with Chrome Dev. Many times during last month I’ve got situations when bookmarks removed from one profile are restored after I’d opened an older profile on another Chrome or on another machine. Also, renamed folders are doubled in these situations: an older folder with an older name is added to a newer folder with a newer name.

One reply from the developer team is particularly interesting:

We’ve received reports of bookmarks getting duplicated or empty titles being padded with whitespaces. In order to investigate and rule out regressions in ongoing launches, let’s introduce some dedicated UMA.

The new code is introduced behind a feature toggle (enabled by default).

They mentioned this fix in the discussion which was later included in v73 and subsequent versions. Could it be possible that the extra layer of User Metrics Analysis (UMA) started all these mess?

Team PiunikaWeb is actively keeping a tab at the situation. Meanwhile, do inform us if you’re experiencing out of the blue disappearance of Google Chrome bookmarks.

Update (August 09, 2021)

IST 10:13 am: Now it is coming to light that some users of Google Chrome are seeing their bookmarks disappear following a recent update to the popular browser.

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I LOST ALL OF MY BOOKMARKS DUE TO THE UPDATE AND I CANT GET ANY BLOODY HELP FROM GOOGLES WORHTLESS HELP CENTERIF YOU KNOW ANY SOLUTIONS PLEASE REPLY ASAP AS I HAVE VERY IPORTANT WORK ON THE LINE.
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I had a massive library of bookmarks and I log into chrome today to find them gone. Not only that, but all my memory and cookies are gone as well. I have no idea why this happened or how to fix it. My history is gone also. I logged into every possible I account I have and it’s the same across the board. This just happened today and I didn’t even restart the application for this to happen. Sync is off. How do I fix this.

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It remains unclear what is causing this section of Google Chrome users to face this issue. That said, we shall continue to keep an eye on this and update as and when we get more info or an official acknowledgment from the company so stay tuned to PiunikaWeb.

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.

Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

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