How to Recover Deleted Safari History on Mac

How to Recover Deleted Safari History on Mac

Have you ever wanted to recover deleted Safari history on a Mac? Maybe you unintentionally or and youd like to reverse those decisions and get the browsing history back? Or maybe youre doing a little bit of investigative work for some reason or another, or youd like to explore some simple digital forensics for Safari browser history on a Mac? Well show you a simple way of recovering deleted Safari history on a Mac. Since were aiming for a simple approach here, well be relying on Time Machine, the backup service on Macs, which happens to offer the simplest way to recover deleted Safari history on a Mac or recover any deleted file for that matter though our focus here is on the Safari web browser. Thus, this approach obviously requires an accompanying Time Machine backup used by the particular Mac in question. If the Mac does not have a and regular backups that are maintained, this simple history recovery approach will not work. Because this restores via a backup, any interim data between when that backup was made and when the restore happened will be lost, so keep that in mind before beginning this process, particular if the browser history is also important itd be wise to back it up first too. Assuming you have the Time Machine backup, here is how you can recover deleted Safari history on a Mac: Thats it, now you have restored the browser history from Safari that was deleted! Inside the ~/Library/Safari/ folder on the Mac, youre specifically looking for the History.db file, which can be a good size depending on how much web browsing you do. Its essentially just a database file that you can query directly with SQL if youd like to, but thats not what were going to do here since you can also just , and were aiming to keep things simple for this particular tutorial. Note this approach will only work for recovering and restoring Safari browsing history that was or from the Mac, it will *not* work for recovering a private session where no history was created. For example, if you in the first place, there would be no history data to restore from Time Machine (or in general outside of some complicated memory or swap extraction attempt anyway, which is exceedingly more advanced than this tutorial would even attempt to imply, though it could be theoretically possible in some scenarios). Obviously this approach is for the Mac, but theoretically you could use a similar method for iOS too. Users can always , as well as delete specific browser history on the iOS Safari browser, but to recover deleted Safari history in iOS you would need to be able to restore a device with a backup either from iCloud or iTunes that contained the deleted Safari history. Thats a topic for another article however, so that wont be discussed here. Was this helpful to you if you needed or wanted to restore deleted Safari web browser history on a Mac? Do you know of another approach that works? Share your comments and experiences in the comments below!