I lost my history due to ill-conceived hidden transient max pages, now I'm trying to combine two history files/ export history!
6 months ago I created a new firefox profile and I transfered over my key settings files like my history/bookmarks.
3 weeks ago my entire history was wiped clear when I started to use my system's pagefile due to some weird function of max_transient pages.
my goal now is to create a new profile which has both my history from january through june which I still have stored in an old archived profile, as well as my recent history of things I've been doing recently, I rely a lot on firefox's auto suggest box to remember websites.
I found this advice:
support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Recovering important data from an old profile#w_bookmarks-and-browsing-history
I followed it, I moved 7000 history entries to boomarks, then exported those bookmarks as html now I imported those bookmarks to the new profile (I know I could've just copied the file but I wanted to test merging history's and my goal here is to merge the 3weeks of entries 7000 entries with the 6months of entries 100,000 entries)..
anyways the exported bookmarks imported successfully, but.... there's no way to convert a bookmark into a history entry!!! if I try to copy/paste from my bookmarks to my history it won't let me, paste isn't even a choice! so what was the point of all this? and why did that old question get resolved and answered in that manner?
so my question is: is there anyway to convert a bookmark into a history entry? It's very easy to convert history entries into bookmarks! all you do is copy/paste! (I'm aware going to a bookmarked site creates the history entry but that's not an option because I don't want to have to load 107,000 websites!?!!! that wouldn't be possible)
so is there anyway to merge histories? or anyway to convert bookmarks into history entries? if this isn't possible I think the answer here should be changed:
support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Recovering important data from an old profile#w_bookmarks-and-browsing-history that answer is bad/useless if it's not possible to do the next step!
I'm willing to try using firefox sync here, but the problem is firefox sync has a limit of 25megabytes and my history file is 75megabytes for the january-june part, and the part that's just novemeber/october is ~20megabytes so I'm not sure if I could perform that sync or not
Modified by namad
All Replies (5)
Although history and bookmarks are stored in a single database file, they are quite different entities and I don't know how you converted history entries to bookmarks. I don't see that in the article: Recover important data from an old profile.
Going forward... It may be difficult to combine the history entries. The built-in tools do not support that. You probably would need some custom database coding to extract from one file and import into the other. Unless there's an add-on that can do it.
Do you need your old history to be "live" in Firefox, or would some kind of archival copy be sufficient?
I meant to link to this questions:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/928204
or maybe another one...
also using firefox sync I was able to do it...
also history entries are simply MORE complicated than bookmark entries so converting history into bookmark is easy, you just copy/paste
also just to clarify things I was able to merge a 20megabyte sqlite file with a 75megabyte sqlite file somehow magically using firefox sync's 25megabytes of storage and the result was somehow only 82megabytes? which I don't quite get, and It only used 23megabytes of my sync storage?
none of the entries are missing though, and the history merge is entirely live and functional, it's great! hooray! (maybe date visited type data was lost but I never cared about)
really the only thing I need from my history is to work like bookmarks that aren't as important as bookmarks in the formula which suggets url's to me when i type in 2or3 letters, anyways... all the answers out there telling people to copy history into a bookmark folder and export... don't do it! it's bad advice there is no way to convert bookmarks back into history entries... and importing 60,000bookmarks from an html file crashes firefox anyways!! (almost always)
anyways firefox sync rocks hooraaaay I can't believe that actually worked!
I'm glad to hear Sync worked.
The reason 1+1 does not = 2 in terms of file size probably is that the two files contained duplicates. I have no idea how Sync resolved those, i.e., whether it very cleverly combined the list of visits and recomputed the frecency score, or simply discarded duplicate data.
Note that the places.sqlite database file never gets smaller, but if necessary is enlarged in 10MB chunks to allow more entries.
So the file may actually be much larger than necessary for the current content. Also favicon stored as BLOB data can take up considerable space.