Cleared website history and data on iPhone's Safari– recovering tabs

Question

Cleared website history and data on iPhone's Safari– recovering tabs

Like someone else in this community, I hit the Clear History and Website Data in my iPhone's Safari settings thinking it would just clear my cache and cookies, not realizing it would clear all of my tabs (stupid, yes, but we're moving on).

Someone suggested to another user that, when looking to restore the Safari tabs that were closed when clearing the Safari history and data, you can restore from a backup if you have a backup created from when the tabs were open. (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252597321)

I tired it last night– I restored my phone to a backup that had been saved from yesterday afternoon, from before I hit that dang button. When my phone had finished loading everything back up, I went into Safari and saw about 100 tabs, but they were all from over a year ago. I feel like it's a lost cause, but any suggestions for restoring the lost tabs? Thanks!

iPhone X, iOS 14

Posted on Dec 31, 2021 10:32 AM

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Answer 1

DerekM87

Community Specialist

Jan 3, 2022 11:02 AM in response to casuallycryingoverapple

casuallycryingoverapple,

If Safari was only recently toggled on in iCloud and you have a backup from before that feature was enabled, that can explain the older tabs.

As to your most recent ones, if Safari is toggled on, those tabs would not come back. Safari in iCloud syncs rather than backs up with that feature enabled, and erasing your history and cookies clears them out. It is doubtful restoring a previous backup again would give different results than what was already restored.

If you'd like to see the way that feature in iCloud works tweaked, we'd recommend leaving feedback for Apple here:

Product Feedback

Cheers!

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Answer 2

DerekM87

Community Specialist

Jan 1, 2022 3:16 PM in response to casuallycryingoverapple

Hi casuallycryingoverapple,

We see you've cleared out the history and website data for Safari, but weren't aware it closed tabs as well.

If Safari is toggled off under Settings > [your name] > iCloud, restoring a previous backup would be your best bet at getting those tabs back. If it's restored more than you were expecting, and you have access to another backup, you can try restoring a different version of your data.

If Safari is toggled on under iCloud, those tabs are synced automatically across the cloud and there would not be an option to restore them if they've been deleted in that manner.

Take care.

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Answer 3

Jan 1, 2022 9:38 PM in response to DerekM87

Hi! Thank you!

Safari is toggled on under iCloud. I did a restore a few days ago; once it was done and I opened Safari, I had many tabs up that had been opened and closed over a year ago– which, I'm assuming they came back because maybe I had Safari toggled off then? Can't think of another reason why they would come back but my tabs from this week wouldn't.

When I look under Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data, I can see data from websites that I visited a few days ago, before I cleared out the history and website data, but it says 0 bytes next to them. When I looked under Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data before doing the restore, there wasn't anything there.

A little confused by how some tabs opened after the restore but the ones from my last "session" didn't, and how the data came back after the restore but the tabs didn't open again.

Do you think I should try restoring a previous backup again? You are, quite literally, the best!

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Cleared website history and data on iPhone's Safari– recovering tabs

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