4 ms·

I have this problem. Some bits of history are gone except from old backups of profile directories and profiles where I've already set places.history.expiration.

by dbtx 7y ago

I have this problem. Some bits of history are gone except from old backups of profile directories and profiles where I've already set places.history.expiration.max_pages to some absurdly high number. I need to do a handful of experiments to see exactly how this interacts with Sync, even though I've (foolishly) already synced the important profiles. I'd hope that the cloud copies of the places database just keeps growing, but in any case, I'd rather combine them all offline anyway.

gwern 7y ago
Even if you set the setting, how can you be sure that it won't be reset on an upgrade or that you'll remember to set it if you need a new profile (perhaps your old one becomes buggy, crufty, corrupt, or all three)? I thought I had all my history retained until one day I couldn't find a website I knew I had visited years ago, and took a closer look at my history and was very unpleasantly surprised... What happened? I'll never know, but my suspicion is that Firefox reset the history retention setting at some point along the way. If you do any web dev, you know Firefox occasionally backstabs you and changes on updates. The only way to be sure over a decade-plus is to regularly export to a safe text file where the Mozilla devs can't mess with it. I can't undo my history loss, but I do know I have lost little history since.
- dbtx 7y ago
  I can't be sure. When I say 'combine them all offline', I mean using something like [1] which refuses to do anything for me because the Waterfox database version is a rather old Firefox version, and that seems to expect all the db's versions to be up-to-date and equal, which seems pointless. #include <sqlite3.h> was my next step-- only I don't walk very well, so that didn't happen "yet". Or I'm lazy, or distracted, or depressed, or something. When I recently got tired of realizing a thing was on the other machine, I bit the bullet and synced them, if only to see how well that worked. Anyway, thanks for the guide. [1] https://github.com/crazy-max/firefox-history-merger https://github.com/crazy-max/firefox-history-merger

by dbtx 7y ago

gwern 7y ago

Even if you set the setting, how can you be sure that it won't be reset on an upgrade or that you'll remember to set it if you need a new profile (perhaps your old one becomes buggy, crufty, corrupt, or all three)? I thought I had all my history retained until one day I couldn't find a website I knew I had visited years ago, and took a closer look at my history and was very unpleasantly surprised... What happened? I'll never know, but my suspicion is that Firefox reset the history retention setting at some point along the way. If you do any web dev, you know Firefox occasionally backstabs you and changes on updates. The only way to be sure over a decade-plus is to regularly export to a safe text file where the Mozilla devs can't mess with it. I can't undo my history loss, but I do know I have lost little history since.

dbtx 7y ago
I can't be sure. When I say 'combine them all offline', I mean using something like [1] which refuses to do anything for me because the Waterfox database version is a rather old Firefox version, and that seems to expect all the db's versions to be up-to-date and equal, which seems pointless. #include <sqlite3.h> was my next step-- only I don't walk very well, so that didn't happen "yet". Or I'm lazy, or distracted, or depressed, or something. When I recently got tired of realizing a thing was on the other machine, I bit the bullet and synced them, if only to see how well that worked. Anyway, thanks for the guide. [1] https://github.com/crazy-max/firefox-history-merger https://github.com/crazy-max/firefox-history-merger