Locate Telegram Chat History on External Hard Drive

Is this Time Machine.. ??

Open the app on your Mac and then open Time Machine.. go back to before you deleted the message and see if it is available.

If that does not work how desperate are you to get the info.. it is sometimes possible but difficult.. I often suggest to people the easiest way to do things.. use a Mac formatted USB drive large enough to hold your entire boot disk.. boot the Mac to recovery partition.. select TM and setup assistant.. go back to after the conversion but before you deleted it.. and recover the entire Mac OS to the USB disk.. not the drive in the Mac.. from there you should be able to boot from it and and it will behave exactly as your Mac did at the time that backup was made.

If there is a way to view websites visited or search history within the backup folders, I'm happy to spend the time reading through the logs no matter how boring or tedious.. but I'm suspecting that it will not be so simple :/

You suspect correctly!

Since OS X Yosemite, Safari stores its web history in a series of database-type files. Prior to that, it was stored in a single History.plist file which you could have been able to read. Regardless, the History.db file is located at: ~/Library/Safari/ in case you are interested.

... so even though Time Machine would have backed these up, you would not be able to read them ... unless, one or more of those backups were made when your Mac was running a version of OS X prior to Yosemite.

You can certainly do a simple search in Time Machine.

But you need to understand the limitations of such a search.

Try it now.. open Time Machine backup roll back to suitable date.. and type the search as the movie title perhaps using the simplest exact wording in quotation marks .. eg... "dallas buyers club"

A single exclusive word to your search would be even better.. eg dallas as long as you seldom would use it outside this context and let it run..

Searching could take a long time.. but see what you come up with.

In my experience this is not very successful. The way apple stores files and then puts those files in the backup means it does not easily allow searches. (Tesserax got in before me with that warning!!)

I will have a crack at this on an old backup and see how it goes..

Otherwise what I suggested before is the best way.. recover from backup a working image of the disk from after you watched the movie and before your deletions.. the work involved as well as expense involved if you don't already have a disk available means your need to prove yourself correct is boardering on manic. (They have medications to help!!).

Time Machine thins a lot of useless stuff out of cache like cookies from chrome or firefox.. so it will be interesting to see what can be found.