Lost years worth of bookmarks after iOS 17 upgrade and cleaning Safari History
After upgrading my iPhone 11 Pro Max to iOS 17, I've noticed the upgrade has significantly slowed down my phone, making it barely usable. The update has also caused me to lose most of my available storage space (currently 1GB available vs. 8GB prior to the update). This is clearly the buggiest update I have ever installed.
In an attempt to regain some storage space, I decided to clean my Safari history which also closed all opened tabs. I then realized that hundreds of my carefully organized bookmarks and bookmark folders collected over the years were gone. They did not return after updating to iOS 17.0.3. I suspect that they got deleted by a cleanup action, but it is also possible that the iOS 17 update deleted them.
I cannot express how extremely frustrating it is to lose your personal library of bookmarks. This type of loss should never occur simply from cleaning your browser history or the OS upgrade, that seems like an obvious bug.
My bookmarks were not synchronized to iCloud. I rely on a local backup, which takes more than 24 hours to create or restore in my experience.
Also, after losing my original bookmarks, I created a few new bookmarks and folders in iOS 17.0.2. However, after upgrading to 17.0.3, those new folders disappeared, while newly created bookmarks remained. What is going on?
My questions:
- Anything can be done to restore my bookmarks without having the full backup restored?
2. What might be the technical reasons for this bookmarks loss, can someone help me to understand?
3. Can the bookmarks alone be selectively restored from an iPhone backup somehow?
Thank you very much!