Description of the issue: Deleted my sync account with my desktop browser because phone browser and desktop browser didn’t want to sync. After deleting, tabs on desktop remained while 70% of tabs on phone disappeared.
How can this issue be reproduced? Presumably by deleting a sync account while tabs are inactive on a mobile device. Not sure. Don’t want to risk more tabs being lost.
Brave 1.80.124 Chromium 138.0.7204.168
That’s not possible – Sync is designed to be “additive” and not delete anything outside of manually removing that data. Deleting a Sync removes all data from the servers and disable Sync, but not clear local data.
It even tells you this when you go to delete a Sync chain:
Were those the only two devices on the chain?
Before I deleted the sync account I had something like 1.7k tabs on my mobile device (yes, I know it’s a lot. Yes, I know I needed to trim it down.) and 800 tabs on my desktop (yes, I know it’s a lot. Yes, I know I need to trim it).
Right after deleting the sync account with my desktop I went to create a new sync chain. When I opened my mobile browser all but one tab group had been undone, 47 tabs remained in the active window, 660 tabs were placed in the inactive category, and the one tab group that remained had 32 tabs. My desktop tabs remained untouched.
The reason why I felt comfortable deleting the sync account was because I read the disclaimer.
Yes. These were the only two devices on the chain.
Thank you for the information.
I’ve reached out to our Sync team about this to see if they can share any thoughts they have on what could possibly cause this.
By chance, is there something in place where after a while inactive tabs are stored on the server instead of on the device? Or where after a certain number of tabs is reached the older ones are put on a recall on the server? I’m no programmer, but IF this was a causal relationship like I think it was, that would be what makes sense.
I’m not saying that deleting the sync account for sure erased those tabs off my device. But I had the mobile browser open a moment before with all my tabs accounted for while trying to get my computer to sync with it before deciding to just delete the account and then a bunch of tabs were gone after. Something else may have happened in that brief period.
The exact steps in my case were:
