30 May 2022 12:31 PM
Sup,
So we have a situation whereby we (the household) need to access (if possible) internet history within our Firefox browser going back a couple of months to March 2022.
Which would be fairly simple to do because we keep stuff like that.
However, the last month the computer had a meltdown and was BSOD'ing and then saying the Recycle Bin on C:\ was corrupted and then changing to a BSOD again and stuck in said cycle. The only way to fix it was to clear out temporary files... which was cache, cookies, internet history (which dated back to Nov 2019). Which fixed the BSOD issue and the fact it thought it's own Recycle Bin was corrupted.
The downside then being, the internet history only goes back to the beginning of May 2022 now.
As far as I knew, nothing is ever deleted permanently on a computer and there are ways to recover it. So I had a Google around and found a guide that said about viewing the Hidden Files and searching for index.dat and then putting that through a reader and then that would stick it back into the Firefox history.
Couldn't find said file, then further read that if the system has been shut down between the times of the history being cleared and trying to recover it - which it has been - then this data is not recoverable.
Tried calling PC World about it, they said because it was data within a browser and not an actual file, it can't be recovered but advised I ask Sky Broadband about it.
Phoned Sky Broadband about it, to see if they had any logs or such and they do not.
That's more or less it.
So what I'm looking to find out, is this internet history absolutely 100% completely gone or is there some way to recover it?
30 May 2022 02:03 PM
Read this for further info https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data#w_what-information-is-s...
You could try an undelete program to try and recover the data, google "windows undelete" eg something like https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva
30 May 2022 02:10 PM
Posted by a Superuser, not a Sky employee. Find out moreIIRC in Firefox the history is stored in a file called places.sql which will be in the user profile directory. C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile folder>
Unfortunately recovering the deleted file will probably require some commercial recovery software. My personal choice is EaseUS but the free version is a bit limited especially if your original browser history file is large. The other problem with large files is there is more potential for parts of it being overwritten because the sectors that were occupied by the original files will have been flagged for reuse.
31 May 2022 07:11 PM
Ah with the correct file (places.sql) I was able to find what I needed.
Didn't need a recovery programme, just went to this site; https://extendsclass.com/sqlite-browser.html
And then added the database to that, and then clicking through the things so moz_origins turned up all the URLs.
Cross checked it with the current history, so under moz_origins was 'wayfair.co.uk' but under current browser history this website hadn't been visited.
Some other section had each individual URL within said origin URLs too.
Got everything I needed ^^
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