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History older than 6 months is suddenly missing!

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  • 22 have this problem
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  • Last reply by mmmelaney

mmmelaney
mmmelaney
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My history older than 6 months is suddenly missing. I am not sure exactly when it went missing but I have always had history back to June 2009 listed. I have backups so will investigate and recover some how.

Is there a limit to how much history FS will save??? If so we need to know about this -- in big bold letters!

Is it possible that it has been consolidated with new visits to the same sites, overwriting the visit date? That would be pretty sophisticated. Firefox Sync seems a little young for that yet.

I am only using FS to sync history between all of my profiles. I use Xmarks to sync bookmarks -- not tabs, or history -- yet! I have my history set to save 720 days in all of my profiles, on all computers. This has not been a problem so far, even when I forget to set one profile and it only holds 30 days - no loss. It doesn't seem to slow down Firefox either.

I also have "vacuum places improved" and "check places" installed. These are the only other things I can think of that might mess with the places.sqlite file. If you need a list of my installed extensions, no problem. There are a lot, but I'm good at working out all the kinks and everything plays nice with each other right now.

Thanks in advance for your help.

My history older than 6 months is suddenly missing. I am not sure exactly when it went missing but I have always had history back to June 2009 listed. I have backups so will investigate and recover some how. Is there a limit to how much history FS will save??? If so we need to know about this -- in big bold letters! Is it possible that it has been consolidated with new visits to the same sites, overwriting the visit date? That would be pretty sophisticated. Firefox Sync seems a little young for that yet. I am only using FS to sync history between all of my profiles. I use Xmarks to sync bookmarks -- not tabs, or history -- yet! I have my history set to save 720 days in all of my profiles, on all computers. This has not been a problem so far, even when I forget to set one profile and it only holds 30 days - no loss. It doesn't seem to slow down Firefox either. I also have "vacuum places improved" and "check places" installed. These are the only other things I can think of that might mess with the places.sqlite file. If you need a list of my installed extensions, no problem. There are a lot, but I'm good at working out all the kinks and everything plays nice with each other right now. Thanks in advance for your help.

Modified by mmmelaney

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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You can look at these prefs on the about:config page.

To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website.
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access that page.

These prefs will be removed in future Firefox versions and replaced with a single places.history.enabled pref to remember history or not.

See http://blog.bonardo.net/2010/01/20/places-got-async-expiration

mmmelaney
mmmelaney Question owner
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Interesting. I changed them all to 720 and expired.sites to 50000 just for the heck of it.

Now how to import my old history back in. I have FEBE and and old backuup from March 2010. It has history back to 10.2009 in it's places.sqlite. I have also exported that history as history.json.

After creating dummy FF profiles and dummy xmarks accounts, then disabling Firefox sync:

I have tried having FEBE restore that history. It does not merge the two, it only replaces.

I tried having Xmarks sync my current history with that history. So far it seems to only delete most of the old history and insert the new. Now that I have changed the history values we spoke of in about:config I might try this approach again. I actually don't know what the Xmarks history limits are yet because the feature is very new. (Little nervous)

I also have Firefox Sync to mess around with but not sure if I trust it since it doesn't have an overwrite or restore option.

Any other ideas?