Just realized i’ve lost three week’s worth of browsing history due to a system crash. It tends to happen because the history.dat file gets corrupted if Firefox was running at the time of the crash. Normally i back up the file and try to rescue-edit it, which usually works. But i guess last time it crashed and restarted overnight, and i didn’t notice the next time i sat down. So i had to revert to an old backup. This is probably no big deal to most people, but i set my History to 9999 days (so it basically never expires) because i like to know where i’ve been. Ever. Not just in the past 9 days. Though doing so creates a whole other set of problems. My history.dat file is currently over 36MB. It’d probably be closer to 50 if i didn’t keep losing data from crashes, and might be around 100MB if there was a way to merge all the old Histories from some of my old profile backups. That might be possible in the future with some changes to how Histories work. The large files and slow performance are the main reasons i’ve been putting off setting up Firefox on my USB drive—which would help solve another major annoyance of mine: bookmark syncing.
On a related note, the new How’d I Get Here extension looks interesting, though i’ve yet to install a trunk build and try it out.
