Safari won't remember Favorites

[Jethro!]

Safari refuses to remember websites that I put into the "Favorites Bar." I can drag a website into the FB and it'll stay there and work until I close Safari and reopen. Then it's gone and all the Favorites have returned to the previous config. IOW, it's the same every time I restart and can't change them. This happens only on this one machine, and it happened on the previous OS, so something has obviously gotten corrupted with Safari that persists even after an OS upgrade.

Any ideas what's going on?

Safari 13 on OS 10.13 on a Mac Pro

 

[Jethro!]

Anyone?

 

[Jethro!]

Bueller? Bueller?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

My guess is that this failure is caused by some sort of damage to your regular user account.

As always when there's some issue with a web browser, the first thing to try is to clear all cookies and launch the browser with all extensions disabled.

If that doesn't work create another user on your Mac, log into that and fire up Safari. If Safari is correctly able to save favorites then clearly something is wrong with your user account.

It could be something like file ownership/permissions or something more prickly.

 

[GerritV]

My suggestion would be to remove the Safari preferences files (.plist) from your user Library.

 

[Jethro!]

My suggestion would be to remove the Safari preferences files (.plist) from your user Library.

Which ones should be removed? I found 17 .plist files. All of them?

Bookmarks.plist
CacheSettings.plist
CloudHistoryRemoteConfiguration.plist
Downloads.plist
Extensions.plist
KnownExtensions.plist
KnownSitesUsingPlugIns.plist
LastSession.plist
Permissions.plist
PerSiteZoomPreferences.plist
PlugInOrigins.plist
PlugInUpdateInfo.plist
RecentlyClosedTabs.plist
SearchDescriptions.plist
SitesAllowedToAutoplay.plist
TopSites.plist
UserNotificationPermissions.plist

 

[GerritV]

Which ones should be removed? I found 17 .plist files. All of them?

Bookmarks.plist
CacheSettings.plist
CloudHistoryRemoteConfiguration.plist
Downloads.plist
Extensions.plist
KnownExtensions.plist
KnownSitesUsingPlugIns.plist
LastSession.plist
Permissions.plist
PerSiteZoomPreferences.plist
PlugInOrigins.plist
PlugInUpdateInfo.plist
RecentlyClosedTabs.plist
SearchDescriptions.plist
SitesAllowedToAutoplay.plist
TopSites.plist
UserNotificationPermissions.plist

I would start with the obvious ones, like Bookmarks.plist, CacheSettings.plist and TopSites.plist.
Stop Safari, drag them out of the Library onto the Desktop, relaunch Safari.
After some browsing, Safari will rebuild these files.
If you don't like what you see, you can always drag the plist files back.

 

[Jethro!]

I would start with the obvious ones, like Bookmarks.plist, CacheSettings.plist and TopSites.plist.
Stop Safari, drag them out of the Library onto the Desktop, relaunch Safari.
After some browsing, Safari will rebuild these files.
If you don't like what you see, you can always drag the plist files back.

It was Bookmarks.plist that was corrupted. It hadn't been "modified" since 2011! Removing it fixed it.

However, now all my bookmarks are gone -- there were a lot. Know if it's possible to somehow reimport them?

 

[GerritV]

It was Bookmarks.plist that was corrupted. It hadn't been "modified" since 2011! Removing it fixed it.

However, now all my bookmarks are gone -- there were a lot. Know if it's possible to somehow reimport them?

By now, you should have a new Bookmarks.plist - right?
Open it in Texteditor, and also the former .plist file.
Copy the text from the former one (note: I would exclude the first line) and paste it into the new one (note: keeping the first line untouched).
Save the new .plist file and try.

Worst case scenario: reinstall the former .plist just once more, and export the bookmarks (Safari File menu). This will produce a .html file that you can later import.

Sorry I didn't think of this procedure earlier...

 

[Jethro!]

By now, you should have a new Bookmarks.plist - right?
Open it in Texteditor, and also the former .plist file.
Copy the text from the former one (note: I would exclude the first line) and paste it into the new one (note: keeping the first line untouched).
Save the new .plist file and try.

Worst case scenario: reinstall the former .plist just once more, and export the bookmarks (Safari File menu). This will produce a .html file that you can later import.

Sorry I didn't think of this procedure earlier...

The second scenario worked nicely. I didn't attempt the first one because upon opening the original Bookmarks.plist in TextEdit I could actually see the file corruption. However, I didn't know exactly where the corruption began or how to reassemble it with the syntax it was expecting, so I went with the "Worst case scenario" -- which wasn't that bad.

So Bookmarks and Favorites appear to be working as they should now. Thank you very much!

 

[GerritV]

The second scenario worked nicely. I didn't attempt the first one because upon opening the original Bookmarks.plist in TextEdit I could actually see the file corruption. However, I didn't know exactly where the corruption began or how to reassemble it with the syntax it was expecting, so I went with the "Worst case scenario" -- which wasn't that bad.

So Bookmarks and Favorites appear to be working as they should now. Thank you very much!

You're welcome, Jethro!