Whenever I access a file . . . its color (which is programmable) changes

I think you are talking about the color of links. When you have not used a link, it is displayed in one color. If you use it, it gets stored in history, and its color is changed to show this.

[v56+] Type about:preferences#general<enter> in the address bar. Look for; Language and Appearance. To its far right, press Colors.

Hi. Thanks, but I don't actually care about the colors; I am trying to find out WHERE the links are stored, each individual one which is used. This is so I can save all the colors I have used (on all opened links, only): So, if I have to reinstall my OS, I can find all the Firefox items I have used (by their violet color) and not worry about items I have not used.

Without this, if I reinstall my OS, none of my Firefox links are saved, and I can't tell which items I have used before reinstallation. Currently, I've probably used well over a million links to store my ~60,000 stored items. Which links were used!??

In the folder of the profile you are using, the places.sqlite file stores the History and Bookmarks.

Thanks: I found a "places.sqlite" file which is over 31 megabytes! I can see references to wikispecies in it. Also, reading (as best I can) the contents of "places.sqlite-wal", I see many references to wikispecies.

BUT, both files are partly encrypted (I think?) and are not usable. Can these files be read, somehow?

As these are data files, not really. There are programs that can extract the bookmarks. But I don't know if there is one to show history.

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Go to that message, and use the Undo link to its right.

The visit state of a link is stored in places.sqlite and can be inspected in the History Manager. You can make the visit count column visible via the right-click context menu on the header bar or via the "Views -> Columns" menu in the Library. You can remove this link (website) from the history to reset the count or use "Forget About This Site".

You can remove all data stored in Firefox for a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History -> Show All History" or "View -> Sidebar -> History").

Using "Forget About This Site" will remove all data stored in Firefox for this domain like history and cookies and passwords and exceptions and cache, so be cautious. If you have a password or other data for that domain that you do not want to lose then make sure to backup this data or make a note.

You can't recover from this 'forget' unless you have a backup of involved files.

If you revisit a 'forgotten' website then data for that website will be saved once again.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/delete-browsing-search-download-history-firefox

OK: I can use the History Manager to view places.sqlite*.

Thanks for the help!

The places.sqlite-shm (Shared Memory) and places.sqlite-wal (Write-Ahead Logging) are SQLite temp files and are only present when Firefox is running and are best left alone.

OK: I'll leave the sqlite files alone.

Just one more question: I have programmed my Firefox directory colors to change to a deep violet when they are accessed or modified. The default (unaccessed) color is a light bluish-green.

If I have to reinstall my Ubuntu OS, including Firefox, am I correct that my accessed items will show their violet color if I reinstall the saved original contents of the following directories:

 /home/jwill/.mozilla
 /home/jwill/.cache/mozilla/firefox
 /home/jwill/.cache/MM/firefox
 and maybe /usr/lib/firefox

Or, would I need to save and reinstall something else? I have over 20,000 accessed/used directories, and I would not like to see them confused with all the unaccessed ones!

The files in /home/jwill/.cache/ are temporary files and aren't that important to backup. Only the files in the profile folder in /home/jwill/.mozilla are important as that is the profile location that stores your personal data like the bookmarks and the logins.

You can find important locations listed on the "Help -> More Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page under Application Basics. Note that you can always download and reinstall Firefox and better is to backup Firefox installer (tar.bz2) if you use Firefox from the Mozilla server.

Could you please not mark your last reply as the solution unless you are satisfied and want to close the thread to avoid confusion ?

So, I'll assume that if I have to reinstall Ubuntu, I can reinstall Firefox and then replace the reinstalled version of .mozilla with a saved copy of /home/jwill/.mozilla -- and this will restore all my (violet) "used" markings?

Thus, I'll be able to find all the Firefox (WikiSpecies) items I have accessed in the past, which is very important to me. If this is wrong, please correct me. If you don't reply, I will assume that this assumption is correct, and this discussion can be ended.