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How to backup my firefox history & downloads?

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I accidentally hit the clear recent history & clear download list I want to know how to backup my History and download history?

I accidentally hit the clear recent history & clear download list I want to know how to backup my History and download history?

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The list of downloaded files is stored in the file downloads.sqlite in the Firefox Profile Folder

See also this for reference:

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I accidentally hit the clear recent history & clear download list

I think that button may be a bit more protected from accidental discharge in Firefox 6 than in Firefox 4 and ask you a question about how much you want to delete. In Firefox 6 the item under Tools is marked "Clear Recent History".

But the safest thing to to do is make it safer for you, so you don't delete your history.

You asked about how to create a backup, so that implies that you do not have backups of your applications. If you had a backup of your profile you could restore places.sqlite back to your profile with Firefox down.

First thing would be to make your browsing history safer -- check your settings for Tools > options > Privacy', make sure you are not clearing more than just cache in "Settings for Clearing History"

  • http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/4928/clearcachew.png
  • clearing your history at end of session, cache is the only one you would want to clear at end of session, if you don't want to lose things. Then if you accidentally press the Clear History under Tools all you will clear is cache.

You can restore your bookmarks only to what you had earlier (not your history) through Firefox. Firefox saves your bookmarks once a day -- usually at the beginning of your day, I think when you first bookmark something in the day. You restore from a .json backup using Firefox itself. Bookmarks > "Show All bookmarks ("Ctrl+Shift+B")" > Import and Backup > Restore > ... (marked by date/time)...

If you know how to use XCOPY then you are in good shape and simply need to know where the profile folder is by typing about:support into the location bar, then click on "Open Containing Folder", which is your current profile. Of course it would be better to backup all your profiles if you have more than one, and better yet to occasionally backup all of your application files.

But since you ask how to do a backup then XCOPY, which is built-in to Windows, is probably not for you.

The following will tell you how to backup and restore a profile using Windows. and you can use the information above to find your profile a lot easier than the convoluted methods in the article.

All you are really interested in in your case is places.sqlite in your profile.
If you have a recent profile backup you can remove the file "places.sqlite" (and "places.sqlite-journal", if found) from the Firefox profile folder and replace it with the "places.sqlite" backup.


Please mark "Solved" one answer that will best help others with a similar problem -- hope this was it.


If you want more information such as using XCOPY, see

Modified by David McRitchie