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reubs

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 22, 2006
1,891
215
I've found myself in a position where I need to restore my browser history and cache. I've got time machine backups that I can use, but I can't figure out how to do it.

For Firefox, I thought it would just has easy as restoring the folder found in ~/Home/Library/Application Support/Firefox from TM, but that doesn't seem to do the trick. I need to be able to get to the cache and not just the history to get some files that I hope got stored locally.

Also, I'm wondering if I can do this same thing for Safari. There are some files that I hope got stored locally that aren't available anymore.

Thanks for any help!
 
I've found myself in a position where I need to restore my browser history and cache. I've got time machine backups that I can use, but I can't figure out how to do it.

For Firefox, I thought it would just has easy as restoring the folder found in ~/Home/Library/Application Support/Firefox from TM, but that doesn't seem to do the trick. I need to be able to get to the cache and not just the history to get some files that I hope got stored locally.

Also, I'm wondering if I can do this same thing for Safari. There are some files that I hope got stored locally that aren't available anymore.

Thanks for any help!

So why can't you just find the information again?

Restore:
User Library Folder Safari folder has history inside and local data

Cheers
 
If you look at the output of this command...

defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions

...you'll see that the entire /User/*anyone*/Library/Caches folder is excluded. Most browsers put their cache files there, and Time Machine does not backup that folder.


Edit: FWIW, "/private/var/folders", "/private/var/tmp" and "/private/tmp" are also on that exclusions list.
 
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