I accidently deleted my Mozilla History while checking through it! Need help ASAP!
Gosh. Me and Mozilla are not getting along well. First my tabs that had site on it became empty(New Tabs). Now I accidently deleted my History. I was just checking through history to get back a tab that I closed 2 days back. But instead I was knocked and I accidently deleted my Mozilla history. It deleted my 7 days, Yesterday and Today's History. Please help me out I need to get back my history. I know that I could use a previous version and restore it. But it is rather old. Can I use the index.dat to recover it? Any alternative ways to recover? Please reply me ASAP. I really appreciate your help.
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By the way the time here date and time here is 6/9/2014 5:07am and the the restore point is 6/8/2014 5.17am which is rather old... Please help me out.
Only IE uses index.dat files. That won't help you with history in other browsers.
As far as I know, there is no Undo for deleting history entries. It's possible that a database mining tool could grope around in the places.sqlite file and pull them out. I am not aware of such a tool, but perhaps the NSA can help?
You can make a backup of your places.sqlite file from your profile folder for possible future investigation. I believe you are familiar with that folder already. I suggest making a copy in a safe place (e.g., Documents folder) immediately before exiting Firefox or making any other changes.
And if have no choice but to restore it, will it act as today's history or will it start a new today's history? Please reply me soon. Thank you!
A restore point less than 24 hours old is better than most people will find... but I don't know whether Windows copies the places.sqlite file into the restore point. To check, right-click it > Properties > Previous Versions. Please do not try to restore while Firefox is running; make sure to fully exit Firefox first. And definitely make that backup first before exiting Firefox.
Hi Testarossa, I'm not sure I understand this question:
And if have no choice but to restore it, will it act as today's history or will it start a new today's history?
Since the entries are dated, I would expect to see history stop at the time of the restore point, and start again with the first new page load.
Since the restore point is dated 1 day back (24 hours ago). After restoring will it be continuing on or will it stop and become Yesterday's History instead of being today. Thanks for your reply Mr. jscher2000. So there's no other alternative way? Well I guess 24 hours back is better than nothing. Do I have to backup my Bookmarks? I heard it stores bookmarks too. How do I backup and restore my bookmarks back once I restore back my older History. Once again thank you so much for your reply.
Yes, places.sqlite stores bookmarks. If you have added bookmarks in the past 24 hours, please do make a backup. You can create a backup using the method in this article, and then restore using the steps in the same article:
Are you planning to restore ONLY the places.sqlite file using the Previous Versions tab? That would be less destructive than a full system restore.
Please keep that backup of your current places.sqlite database (the one you made earlier in this thread!) for any emergency situations that may arise with corrupted files or losing your bookmarks.
It is best to only use a previous version of the places.sqlite file if available in the right-click context menu to avoid losing even more data in the Firefox profile folder as Windows will restore .js and .ini files as well (i.e. you get an older version of the sessionstore.js and prefs.js files).
As always, make sure to backup the entire Firefox profile folder in the roaming location before starting to experiment.
You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
If you want to explore further, I can suggest using the SQLite Manager extension to look into your backup places.sqlite database to see whether the history tables are empty in there. If not, it's possible that the deletion was journaled but that the change had not yet been applied to the actual database at the time you made the backup. But unfortunately I don't have time to go into all the steps at the moment.
Yes only the places.sqlite since I do not have any other choice to recover my previous history.
Recovering important data from an old profile {web Link}
If you've had to create a new Firefox profile, this article will explain how to recover information like bookmarks, history and passwords from an old one.
Thank everybody for all your quick replies. Appreciate it. I have to go in a while. As I am leaving soon to go for work. Mr. jscher2000 it would be great if you could go through the steps when you have time. Thanks FredMcd and cor-el for the replies. So once I restore it to the previous version, when I am browsing the history it will start as new right? I do not want it to continue as it will mess up my history.
By the way cor-el do you want me to copy and paste the entire Mozilla profile somewhere safe in my computer or just the file?
How did you delete the history? If it was a straight delete, it could be in your recycle folder. If it was from using a file edit program, some of them make backups of the original.
Unless you remove the history item, or it is done from your settings, each enter in the history folder is written in stone.
Hi Testarossa, this part is hard to understand:
So once I restore it to the previous version, when I am browsing the history it will start as new right? I do not want it to continue as it will mess up my history.
As noted above, what I would expect is that your history would look like you took 24 hours off from using Firefox.
Hey FredMcD I deleted it when I was checking the history to find my tab and I was deleting unnecessary history too individually on Mozilla itself. During that time I was knocked by my brother so I must have accidently clicked on Today's history instead of individual history. So it eventually deleted Today's history, Yesterday's History and the 7 days history too... I am really upset with this... And there's no way of recovering them but just using the Restore Point which half of the history would not be there.
Hi Mr. jscher2000. I think I understood you. So firefox will think I didn't use it for 24 hours and will start on a New history(Today's History) after restoring the previous version and browsing right after that would be stored in Today's History. And the older being place on Yesterday and last 7 days consecutively.
You have only removed the history from the last few days. If you visit new pages then Firefox will create new history items for those visited websites and Yesterday and the Last 7 Days will reappear as soon as there is history available that fits in that range.
Such folders show the result of a database query and only appear if there is data that applies.