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How can I merge an old browsing history file into the current one?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Several weeks ago, the C: drive on my PC was replaced and Firefox was recreated before I could copy over my old profile to the new drive. I now want to recover the old browsing history, but of course the new profile already has its own, more recent, places.sqlite file that I do not want to lose.

How can I merge the two histories?

Several weeks ago, the C: drive on my PC was replaced and Firefox was recreated before I could copy over my old profile to the new drive. I now want to recover the old browsing history, but of course the new profile already has its own, more recent, ''places.sqlite'' file that I do not want to lose. How can I merge the two histories?

Chosen solution

That is not possible.
You can't merge the history.

A way to achieve this would be to use a separate profile and copy the places.sqlite file to that profile (delete an existing places.sqlite-journal file).
Use Copy and Paste to copy the history items to a bookmarks folder in the Bookmarks Menu folder.
Export the bookmarks to an HTML file and import that HTML file in the current Firefox profile.

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Chosen Solution

That is not possible.
You can't merge the history.

A way to achieve this would be to use a separate profile and copy the places.sqlite file to that profile (delete an existing places.sqlite-journal file).
Use Copy and Paste to copy the history items to a bookmarks folder in the Bookmarks Menu folder.
Export the bookmarks to an HTML file and import that HTML file in the current Firefox profile.

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or set up firefox sync in the two profiles & sync the history data...

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I also found another solution: Firefox has an addon called SQLite Manager The history and bookmarks records are kept in a common SQLite database that can be edited with this addon. It can also import and export data from or to other tables.

I can import data from an old backup of places.sqlite that contains the links I am looking for and merge it into the current one. QED

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You can easily corrupt places.sqlite when you move items from history to bookmarks with the SQLite Manager extension. They both use different fields and tables and you would also need to rebuild the indexes.