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Recover a mistakenly deleted entry from browser history

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Looking in browser history for a time stamped entry showing success in applying for a $6,000 rebate from Duke Energy to demonstrate I did complete the process at 9:11 AM, not 11:00 AM -- so this is important. Found it and needed to copy the line with the time stamp without the whole browser history. Was able to just copy the site with "success=true", but no time/date. Tried drag and drop, but that just deleted the entry entirely. Is there any way to recover it?

Looking in browser history for a time stamped entry showing success in applying for a $6,000 rebate from Duke Energy to demonstrate I did complete the process at 9:11 AM, not 11:00 AM -- so this is important. Found it and needed to copy the line with the time stamp without the whole browser history. Was able to just copy the site with "success=true", but no time/date. Tried drag and drop, but that just deleted the entry entirely. Is there any way to recover it?

Chosen solution

If it was still in your History, the pages are likely to be in the cache unless you have cleared it or this happened a long time ago. You can search for the cached pages with this: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html If the browser has been closed once since you visited the pages, they will have been written to disk. If not, you may yet see the entry, but not be able to pull up the page itself.

Edit: Forgot, you can check if it id there easily by typing about:cache into the address bar, and Enter. Click the link "List Cache Entires" in the Disk section.

If you have not closed the browser since deleting the history entry, and depending on how Firefox deletes entries, possibly maybe it is discoverable with an external tool: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_history_view.html

Read this answer in context 👍 1

All Replies (4)

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Many e-mail providers have a trash folder. Not your computer's trash, the website.

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This is not an email account. It is the Firefox Browser's history. Don't see a trash folder for that.

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Chosen Solution

If it was still in your History, the pages are likely to be in the cache unless you have cleared it or this happened a long time ago. You can search for the cached pages with this: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html If the browser has been closed once since you visited the pages, they will have been written to disk. If not, you may yet see the entry, but not be able to pull up the page itself.

Edit: Forgot, you can check if it id there easily by typing about:cache into the address bar, and Enter. Click the link "List Cache Entires" in the Disk section.

If you have not closed the browser since deleting the history entry, and depending on how Firefox deletes entries, possibly maybe it is discoverable with an external tool: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_history_view.html

Modified by crankygoat

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From where to where did you drag this history item ?

Note that Firefox only shows the most recent visit, so if you (accidentally) open this URL then a new history entry has been created and the original entry is hidden. The above mentioned Nirsoft utility "mozilla_history_view.html" might help to uncover such a hidden history item.

There is no backup for the history, so once deleted it is lost unless you have a backup copy of places.sqlite.