Browsing History Recovery
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)
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.
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.