It’s been years (or is it weeks?) since something odd, implausible, and inexplicable happened to one or more of my Apple computers that doesn’t happen to anyone else’s. You know you want to hear this.
So yesterday morning I’m in my hotel, finishing some work on my laptop before leaving for the airport, when MobileMe alerts me that in order to sync the bookmarks on my laptop, it will need to delete some and add some. I click OK. A few seconds later, I have no bookmarks in Safari.
That’s strange, but it’s a bit liberating, too. I feel lighter. That kink in my neck is gone.
Heck, I can re-create the few bookmarks I really need and do without the rest, right? (Besides, I imported my Safari bookmarks into Chrome a few weeks ago, and I sync Chrome bookmarks via Google, so the bookmarks aren’t really gone, they’re just gone from Safari.)
I re-create five or six bookmarks in my laptop’s Safari bookmarks bar, close my laptop, and fly home.
Here’s where it gets weird.
At home, after midnight, sleepless, jetlagged, I turn on my iMac. MobileMe wants to sync my bookmarks. It says it will delete quite a few of them and create a handful of new ones. There is no option to send my iMac’s bookmarks to MobileMe instead. There is no option not to sync. I can skip sync for now, but eventually I’ll have to sync, and that means I’ll have to let MobileMe wipe my many old Safari bookmarks off all my computers. No sense delaying the inevitable.
I click OK.
My old bookmarks are gone, but the new ones I created on my laptop have not been sync’d. I have no bookmarks.
I start re-creating them from scratch, and as I create them, they disappear.
I create a Flickr bookmark. It works. I create a zeldman.com admin bookmark. When I look up, the Flickr bookmark has disappeared. I create a Twitter bookmark. When I look up, the zeldman.com admin bookmark has disappeared. A moment later, the Twitter bookmark has disappeared.
I begin quitting Safari immediately after creating a bookmark (in order to force Safari to save it). This seems to work. When I re-start Safari, the bookmark I just created has been saved. I do this six times in order to create and save the few bookmarks I really need in order to work.
I don’t bother re-creating the dozens of JavaScript bookmarklets I use daily. I figure I can do those in the morning. I verify that Safari now contains six bookmarks. I run a backup via SuperDuper and go to bed.
In the morning, my bookmarks bar is blank again. Overnight, all my bookmarks have disappeared.
It can’t be from syncing via MobileMe, because the computer should have gone to sleep as soon as the backup finished (and it was asleep when I woke up this morning).
At this point all I can figure is that Apple wants me to switch to Chrome.