After the mini-rant in my last post about the mess that Vivaldi’s sync engine made out of the notes, bookmarks, and saved passwords I had sprinkled about my various devices, I set out to finally do something about it, lest I get called a whinger.

First I logged out of ‘sync’ on all the Vivaldi installs I could find, – dual boot machines, and mobile — both stable and snapshot versions — and purged all but one completely. I then, with careful discrimination, went over the remaining install to be used as a base to rebuild the others from. However…. upon signing into sync again, my shortcuts, notes, saved logins and passwords were once again polluted!

What started at a steadfast determination to expunge redundant and extraneous entries resulted only in more frustration, as I wasn’t hitting the mother-lode stored on their servers.

This is when I really started looking, found this helpful write up, and came across the –> vivaldi://sync-internals <– screen which serves as a central dashboard of all my synced devices data. If you are using Vivaldi, cut and paste that link in a new tab…

This is the Holy Grail of dashboards. I had a thought that one must exist, but where… oh where was it hidden, or was it even available to the unwashed like me to poke around in. As it turns out (so far at least), the only requirement to view this is to be logged into sync on the machine you are using and the url will work. I honestly haven’t even tried without.

Sure enough, here was the data set that was over-riding my changes. The problem was that it didn’t ‘sync’ when I wanted it to, it ‘synced’ when it wanted to. However, over on the Sync Node Browser tab there is this nice “Refresh” button at the top left.

While I couldn’t edit this screen myself, hitting refresh uploaded my changes upon request, and I could thus determine the base data set waiting for download once the other installs were signed back into sync. Hurahhh!!

No more wondering where the duplicates came from, or how they ended up there. Understanding is everything.

Which is what still amazes me about this browser. Years later, I am still learning how to put it to work fully, with each new addition to my repertoire offering significant change and convenience. I could have learned this a while ago, I guess, so perhaps you could you simply call it catching up.

FYI, last update (snapshot) I noticed this new alarm clock down in the bottom right… Now, what’s that do…