Safari History - how to restore from Time Capsule?

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Level 1

73 points

Safari History - how to restore from Time Capsule?

Background...
I couldn't open Safari today (beachballing with no window opening whatsoever), presumed the "com.apple.Safari.plist" file was corrupted so deleted it from "~/Library/Preferences", and restored a copy using Time Machine from my Time Capsule from yesterday before I had the issue. Safari settings from yesterday restored and working.

However...
My Safari History going back 2 years has deleted to just one month ago! How can I restore these from a previous Time Capsule backup? Is it just "History.plist" file from "~/Library/Safari" that needs to be restored, or also the one titled "HistroyIndex.sk" in the same location, and/or any others?
Also, do I need to restart machine after restoring all files needed, or should the history show immediately after just relaunching Safari?

Note: I tried doing the "History.plist" one only, yet still just get the one month of history showing. This is really urgent as I have sites in my 2 year browsing history I need to get to again!

Help very very gratefully received :-\

2x MBP 2.93GHz, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.6.6 "Snow Leopard"/32GB iPhone 4, OS 4.2.1, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Jan 7, 2011 11:04 PM

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Answer 1

jimthing Author

Level 1

73 points

Jan 8, 2011 2:22 AM in response to jimthing

Anyone... ?

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Answer 2

jimthing Author

Level 1

73 points

Jan 8, 2011 3:40 AM in response to jimthing

OK, I'll answer my own question after speaking to AppleCare reasonably successfully for once.

I retried just restoring that "History.plist" from a bit further back than before, and hey presto the history was was restored (minus the last 2 days, my restore point, which I can live with).

*Though I am still finding that with circa 2 years worth of history, they may be starting to delete from the back-end after a while; _so I presume there may be a theoretical max amount of sites and/or dates Safari will keep in there regardless of setting "Manually" for history deletion?_*
*(and yes, I have plenty of hard disc space.)*

*AppleCare couldn't answer whether there was a max amount either on my phone call when asked directly either, even after them speaking to "second line".*
*Rather ridiculously they don't even know, or couldn't find, the spec of the products themselves!*

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Answer 3

jimthing Author

Level 1

73 points

Jan 8, 2011 3:42 AM in response to jimthing

...kind of answered the main point, just shame can't get answer on the bigger one underlying it!

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Answer 4

andyBall_uk

Level 7

20,516 points

Jan 8, 2011 4:14 AM in response to jimthing

There used to be (and it's still referenced in the application) a working hidden preference key 'WebKitHistoryItemLimit' which could be increased to extend the limit from some lowish default to at least 9999

I'm guessing that the default nowadays is higher, since I see over 6000 items in my 14 day history, and haven't touched that key.

I would get prefsetter from http://www.nightproductions.net/prefsetter.html and see how many 'items' your history plist shows now - then you'll have a reference point & can see if there is a limit & what happens if you try to increase it.

The history would naturally have been abridged after removing safari's plist, since the default HistoryAgeInDaysLimit key set via Safari-Preferences-General, is 31 (after one month...)

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