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Browsing History Recovery

adam.moos
adam.moos
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Hi,

My hard drive crashed and I was able to recover the files. I need to recover my Firefox history file. I know it is stored in the profiles folder as places.sqlite. What I need to do is open the file so I can see the history and recover the needed data.

I'm working from a data recovery disk (the source computer is still down). Is there a way to open the file and see it in Firefox? Or, is there a way to export the data into a format that can be read by Excel?

Thanks very much for your help!

Adam

Hi, My hard drive crashed and I was able to recover the files. I need to recover my Firefox history file. I know it is stored in the profiles folder as places.sqlite. What I need to do is open the file so I can see the history and recover the needed data. I'm working from a data recovery disk (the source computer is still down). Is there a way to open the file and see it in Firefox? Or, is there a way to export the data into a format that can be read by Excel? Thanks very much for your help! Adam

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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You can place places.sqlite and other database files in a Firefox profile to inspect its content, but places.sqlite contains a lot of tables that are linked via a specific field and you would have to run SQLite queries to format the output to get a usable view. Firefox doesn't have a way to export the history and a possible workaround is a copy/paste from history to bookmarks in the Library.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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It would be easiest if you have Firefox up and running, you could copy over these older files to replace the current ones (carefully, don't copy in the wrong direction!):

  • places.sqlite
  • favicons.sqlite

Alternately, if you have a friend with Windows, they could use the following program to export your history. For me, one month's history (every single page retrieved) adds up to nearly a 5MB HTML table, so it's a lot of data. It does have a CSV option for a more Excel-friendly format.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_history_view.html