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After a Firefox session restore problem, I lost my entire browsing history and can't seem to get it back

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When I restored a previous session from Firefox after a laptop crash, instead of restoring to the supposed previous day it went back to a session that happened 2 months ago. I'm not sure why this is, but the more important problem came later.

So I tried fixing that by going into the Firefox profile folder and restoring previous versions of the sessionstore files. Unfortunately I wasn't making any progress and at one point reopened Firefox to see that my entire history disappeared. I'm not sure how this happened. I know the history is stored within the places.sqlite but in no way shape and form did I go near that file.

I used ShadowExplorer to find an earlier version of my profile folder and copied and pasted it as a backup. I used the places.sqlite from that but I was still getting an empty history and it was also not recording any more new history. I also tried pasting the entire backup profile folder onto the main profile folder. And I tried creating a new profile and transferring my places.sqlite there but I get the same result. However my bookmarks are still there.

Is there no way to get my history back? I'm guessing it is a corrupted places.sqlite. Is it possible to repair the places.sqlite? Sadly I don't have any knowledge on how to use SQlite shell to repair it myself. It would be nice if someone could do that for me! Strangely, the places.sqlite file size is 10240kb, which seems a bit too small for my entire history.

I'm terrible at explaining things so I apologize if it was hard to follow. I'm distraught about this and pretty desperate to get my history back. I'd appreciate any help.

When I restored a previous session from Firefox after a laptop crash, instead of restoring to the supposed previous day it went back to a session that happened 2 months ago. I'm not sure why this is, but the more important problem came later. So I tried fixing that by going into the Firefox profile folder and restoring previous versions of the sessionstore files. Unfortunately I wasn't making any progress and at one point reopened Firefox to see that my entire history disappeared. I'm not sure how this happened. I know the history is stored within the places.sqlite but in no way shape and form did I go near that file. I used ShadowExplorer to find an earlier version of my profile folder and copied and pasted it as a backup. I used the places.sqlite from that but I was still getting an empty history and it was also not recording any more new history. I also tried pasting the entire backup profile folder onto the main profile folder. And I tried creating a new profile and transferring my places.sqlite there but I get the same result. However my bookmarks are still there. Is there no way to get my history back? I'm guessing it is a corrupted places.sqlite. Is it possible to repair the places.sqlite? Sadly I don't have any knowledge on how to use SQlite shell to repair it myself. It would be nice if someone could do that for me! Strangely, the places.sqlite file size is 10240kb, which seems a bit too small for my entire history. I'm terrible at explaining things so I apologize if it was hard to follow. I'm distraught about this and pretty desperate to get my history back. I'd appreciate any help.

All Replies (1)

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Several days have passed, so I wonder whether your Firefox is successfully recording fresh history now, or whether history is still broken? (And if history is broken, that can affect bookmarking, too.)

Sometimes if the Places database is corrupt, the file may be renamed with a .corrupt extension. That may or may not actually be recoverable, but could explain why the file seemingly disappeared. Have you noticed a places.sqlite.corrupt in your profile folder?