History of old profile
So I rested my Windows 10 yesterday and I reinstalled Firefox which I was fine with because I had enabled Sync. It was fine except my history was not restored at all. All my bookmarks and passwords were fine and there was not a loss of data in those two. Now, I found my old Firefox profile (I'm guessing it is the old one) in the Windows.old folder and I have a new profile now (obviously). Is there a way to retrieve the history from the old profile? Also, does the Sync feature not sync the browser history?
Chosen solution
History stored and the Sync server expires in 60 days so if this is about older history data then this might explain it.
Windows created the C:\Windows.old folder when you update from an older Windows version or reinstall Windows to have a backup of your personal data.
You can copy places.sqlite to recover the history. The places.sqlite database stores both bookmarks and history, so you may have to restore the bookmarks from a recent JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder. If this is a recent profile then you need favicons.sqlite for the favicons.
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-bookmarks-from-backup-or-move-them
All Replies (2)
Chosen Solution
History stored and the Sync server expires in 60 days so if this is about older history data then this might explain it.
Windows created the C:\Windows.old folder when you update from an older Windows version or reinstall Windows to have a backup of your personal data.
You can copy places.sqlite to recover the history. The places.sqlite database stores both bookmarks and history, so you may have to restore the bookmarks from a recent JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder. If this is a recent profile then you need favicons.sqlite for the favicons.
It was not just the older data. None of the history was synced. I suppose I neglected to post that I had reset my Firefox's account's password. I did recall seeing a warning which indicated that a password reset would wipe data stored but I thought since the bookmarks were all synced fine, the history would be too. Back to the solution though, yes I did copy those files on the same day I posted this. I did copy few files and had forgotten to copy the file associated with the search preferences but that's fine. Glad to see I did follow your solution, even though I did it before I could view your answer :D Quick question : In the same scenario, instead of copying few files from the old profile, would it have worked fine if I had copied the entire folder and pasted it? Thanks!