Very sadly I just lost three years' worth of browse history in Firefox. This loss is quite significant for me because I relied on it as a record of important sites, where I've been, and information I’ve accumulated over time. Ironically or criminally, Firefox also asked me to restart it to finalise an update, which I then did.
Is there any way to recover the places.sqlite file from somewhere?
I think what could have happened (I'm guessing) was I unknowingly or unintentionally had 'Clear history when Firefox closes' enabled on my mobile app, which synced the setting when I signed into Firefox Sync on my desktop.
My favicon cache has also been deleted which is also an accompanying annoyance.
I want to suggest some things to prevent this from happening to others:
- Warning Notification: A warning when enabling the 'Clear history when Firefox closes' option, and/or a notification upon closing the browser would remind users that this action will permanently delete their history
- Automatic Backups: An automatic backup feature of Firefox Profile data, or at the very least, a 'bin' directory for overwritten data files
- Restore Options: A way to restore deleted history from local cache or temporary files, or temporary lockfiles of files like places.sqlite, favicons.sqlite and session-store backups
- Better Firefox Sync Features: Improving Sync to better make users aware of settings that could impact their local data or even offer compressed encrypted storage options on the cloud
