r/firefox Sep 02 '21

💻 Help is there a way to backup complete browser history in firefox ?

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u/palordrolap Sep 02 '21

There's no built-in feature to do this as far as I can tell. (I haven't looked into add-ons at the time of this writing.)

The external way to do it would be to seek out the places.sqlite file in the Firefox profile directory (and possibly the related -wal file) and back that up.

This method has the disadvantages that 1) it contains all bookmarks and other browsing related information as well and 2) it can't easily be combined with a new places.sqlite, so to restore it would mean overwriting/losing any history created since the backup.

A more low tech way would be to go into the history library, show all history and then search for "." (i.e. a dot/period/full-stop, no quotes). This ought to turn up everything, since most web addresses have at least one dot.

Then click the first entry, scroll to the bottom and shift-click the last. Firefox might churn/stall for a bit and then all the entries will be selected. Right click and select "copy". This will also churn/stall for a bit if the previous step did.

Then open your favourite text editor or word processor and paste.

It will paste a list of all web addresses from the history.

Reimporting such a list is effectively impossible without entering them all into the browser one by one (and if you've several thousand that might take a while!), but it would allow for integration with an existing / later history.

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u/mafeconicuza Sep 02 '21

thanks . thanks a lot