My experience: Brave’s Sync (Chromium version 0.59.34 and later) appears to add bookmark entries to all active sync-enabled instances. The current arrangement more or less assures many duplicated entries as well as the reappearance of old / deleted entries. I find this worse than useless. It necessitates expending considerable time and effort cleaning up the resulting mess. Thank you Department-of-Redundancy-Department.
What follows works for me with one 32-bit and two 64-bit Windows 7 desktop installations. It’s 110% empiricism. It’s entirely possible what I do won’t reproduce the same results on other installations; and if you’re using a different operating system, what I do may have no relevance. Free advice; worth every penny.
Be warned: my alternative to Brave Sync is sort of like taking an ax to a lifeboat to test a personal flotation vest. There may be a better way. Two consequences either of which might be deal-breakers for others: first, preferences are restored to their defaults; second, extensions must be re-installed. That said, my experience is that once I personalize a browser’s preferences and add bookmarks, updating preferences and bookmarks is infrequent. Bravely onward.
Search your computer for an entry similar to:
C:\Users*****\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\
where C:\ is where Brave is installed and ***** is the your user name. If you inspect the properties of this entry, it should have hundreds of sub-directories (folders) and thousands of files. I transfer this entry to the equivalent location on the target computer. I use Microsoft’s free SyncToy 2.1 application: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155 SyncToy’s “Echo” action
- transfers entries from source to target that don’t currently exist on the target;
- updates older existing entries on the target; and
- deletes entries on the target that aren’t on the source.
note to Brave: This is what “Sync” should do.
I do this with the computers physically networked through a common router, but that’s not required. All that’s required is that the computers be available on the same network. Physically networked, the operation takes about a minute. Unknown: I suppose it’s possible to upload the source data either to cloud or portable storage and subsequently copy the stored source data to a target. I haven’t tried this. And if it works, merely copying wouldn’t offer the housekeeping SyncToy provides.
Despite the nuisance of having to re-set preferences (which I prudently made note of beforehand) and reinstall extensions, there’s one overarching benefit to this approach in addition to updating bookmarks on the target computer(s). I only have a few extensions installed. One is uBlock Origin. I was delighted to find that after reinstalling uBlock Origin on the target computer(s), uBlock Origin preferences from the source computer had been transferred. If you use uBlock Origin, you know: this is Very Good.
As noted above, there may be a better way to do this. And beyond the two shortfalls I mentioned, my workaround may have other perils of which I’m unaware. Perhaps Brave will alter its implementation of Sync. In the meantime, what I described works for me.
