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Firefox history only shows my browsing with old imac, not new

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  • Last reply by charyis

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Firefox history only shows my browsing with old imac and doesn't save new history of browsing with my new imac

Running firefox 48.0.2 Old imac was running snow leopard when the hard drive died. New imac is running El Capitan

Last month I used the time machine backup on an external hard drive to restore data using migration assistant. The backup that was migrated however was from the earliest rather than the latest on the drive -- a three year difference in time -- probably due to operator error, sigh. I have since been able to recover most data reaching into the same drive for the later backups, including my mozilla profile. By doing so, though, I did not "inherit" the history so I could keep it AND continue adding to it, but I can't figure out how to do that now. Thanks in advance for any hints.

Firefox history only shows my browsing with old imac and doesn't save new history of browsing with my new imac Running firefox 48.0.2 Old imac was running snow leopard when the hard drive died. New imac is running El Capitan Last month I used the time machine backup on an external hard drive to restore data using migration assistant. The backup that was migrated however was from the earliest rather than the latest on the drive -- a three year difference in time -- probably due to operator error, sigh. I have since been able to recover most data reaching into the same drive for the later backups, including my mozilla profile. By doing so, though, I did not "inherit" the history so I could keep it AND continue adding to it, but I can't figure out how to do that now. Thanks in advance for any hints.

Chosen solution

so if anyone else experiences this problem in future here is what seems to have solved it: While doing a little housecleaning and deleting old files that I hadn't opened in forever, I discovered a second firefox profile in my documents leftover from when I migrated to a new computer in 2008 (from XP). I deleted its folder thinking I was just reducing junk files and later was surprised to discover that my firefox history was now adding new history to the migrated history from last month. Don't understand it but whatever works...

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Hmm, did you get a partial restore of the more recent profile or nothing?

If you have a mix of data, perhaps the places.sqlite database file was locked and failed to be replaced when you copied over the new files. You could try again. Please make sure Firefox is not running when you do that.

If you still see only the old data, did you copy over the entire old profile folder? Firefox would not automatically use a different folder, so you may need to do a file edit or some renaming to make Firefox "see" it if you are taking that route.

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Thanks for your response! I got nothing of the more recent profile when I migrated. I right away recognized that my bookmarks and tool bars were wrong so I searched forums to figure out how to manually get my latest profile back. I deleted the entire profile on the new machine (which was from the earlier backup) and copied the entire profile folder from the latest time machine backup to my new computer. I thought I was home free because my bookmarks and toolbars were back to normal as expected originally. It was only now a week later that I notice any recent history is missing. Searching for a clue as to why that might be the only thing I could come up with was the "inherit" history thing which I didn't get the opportunity to do so I now have old history up to August this year but recent history amnesia for all of September. I guess what I'm asking is how do I now start gathering new history to add to the old.

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so essentially replacing the folder worked as advertised but -- just can't get new history to add. Not sure if I'm explaining the problem well enough.

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Chosen Solution

so if anyone else experiences this problem in future here is what seems to have solved it: While doing a little housecleaning and deleting old files that I hadn't opened in forever, I discovered a second firefox profile in my documents leftover from when I migrated to a new computer in 2008 (from XP). I deleted its folder thinking I was just reducing junk files and later was surprised to discover that my firefox history was now adding new history to the migrated history from last month. Don't understand it but whatever works...