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How do i delete a certain part of firefox history

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  • 1 has this problem
  • 94 views
  • Last reply by nickless

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I have Firefox History from 2008-2016. How do i delete 2008-2012? Can i make backup of that part only?

I have Firefox History from 2008-2016. How do i delete 2008-2012? Can i make backup of that part only?

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How much history do you have in that time frame?

You can type a colon in the search bar in the History Manager (Library) to get a list sorted by time and then start deleting history from the bottom. It is best not to select too many items at the time via Shift+Ctrl+PageUp starting at the bottom, 1000 is a good value to start. You can press the Delete key to remove selected items.


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Expire history by days {web link} Allows to expire history older than a fixed amount of days.

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According to the developer this one only works for 2 years (730 days). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/expire-history-by-days/reviews/805404/

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Chosen Solution

How much history do you have in that time frame?

You can type a colon in the search bar in the History Manager (Library) to get a list sorted by time and then start deleting history from the bottom. It is best not to select too many items at the time via Shift+Ctrl+PageUp starting at the bottom, 1000 is a good value to start. You can press the Delete key to remove selected items.


See also:

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Not sure, how to count that? I guess it's ~800000 Visited Pages in that timeframe. 728MB places.sqlite. Browser is getting slow past couple months, so i need a bit cleanup. Is there any way to so "split" that data?

OT: Does anyone know a fulltext History addon that works 'offline' (not 3rd party cloud based)?

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With that much history it can take quite a lot of time to cleanup older history. An extension that uses JavaScript won't work in your case. Removing too many history items at the time can lock Firefox for significant time. I don't know if you could do this with an external SQLite manager program because the places.sqlite database is very complicated and uses a lot of tables. You should at least keep a backup copy of places.sqlite that you can restore in case of problems.

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Before doing anything, it would be a good idea to backup the current profile someplace safe just in case.

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I make monthly backups to my owncloud. But i want to reduce size so Firefox will be faster. Even Norvell History Tools seems to be overwhelmed with that amount (shows me only back to 2010 and took a long time to load). I guess it should become a long terrible weekend. Thanks for all the help this seems solved now.