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How do I restore my browser session and history data?


Fractalogic

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Hey everyone!

 

I accidently right-clicked on the recycle bin on my desktop, and then clicked "Run CCleaner". But that's not what I wanted, I wanted to click on the "Eraser" option that belongs to another sofware I have installed.

 

Little did I know that by clicking the "Run CCleaner" option from the recycle bin context-menu it actually automatically starts to remove browser history, saved passwords, cookies, browser sessions and so forth, once the program has loaded. Also, there is no program window appearing in the task-bar. Instead, an icon appears in the notification area (system tray). Once I realized what was going on it was too late to stop it.

 

What I would like to do is to recover my browser session and history data. I don't care for the other stuff. What can I do to recover it at this point?

 

First of all, I would like to know what was deleted, and get the file paths. But I cannot locate any log file for CCleaner. Where does CCleaner store its log file? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

 

You can see in the attached screenshot what settings were used.

 

Where is browser history for Google Chrome and Firefox stored?

 

Where is browser session file for Google Chrome and Firefox stored?

 

Thank you in advanced!

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Firefox browser history and session file is stored in \AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.

 

Chrome browser history and session file is stored in \AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default.

 

This is true at least for Windows Vista and 7, for Windows XP it's not. It should be somewhere in the Documents and Settings folder on XP.

 

However, I was unable to restore any previous versions of the files in these two folders using shadow copy. In fact, all my shadow copies seem to be gone! Could it be that CCleaner has deleted them? Could it be that CCleaner is in fact designed to remove shadow copies of files and folders as well? I have not found any setting or option for this.

 

And what about that log file? CCleaner loggs performed tasks, does it not?

 

Looks like I will have to rely on my 2 day old backup of my users folder in order to restore these two folders to their previous state. It's a shame, because I had so many new tabs open in both of the browser since that. It's too bad that shadow copy didn't work, otherwise I would have restored the browser files in a snap. It's a mystery to me why they are gone. I am currently suspecting Ccleaner for it.

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I have now restored some of the tabs I had open and parts of the browser history in Firefox and Chrome. It was not an easy task because I had no shadow copies and my backup was older than I thought, it's in fact one week old. I used Acronis True Image to recover the profiles to their previous versions.

 

But I made another mistake by restoring all of the files and overwriting existing files. This resulted in a corrupted Firefox profile and caused it to close unexpectedly every time I started it. This was most likely caused by restoring an add-on (a tab preview add-on) that previously disabled and removed. It was now back again. Firefox prompted me about it the first time I started it and asked if I wanted to continue and install it. I decided to go ahead and since that Firefox has been closing as soon as it starts, with no error at all. I had to do some tricks with profile manager and safe mode to fix it. I at least have my bookmarks back now, and I have restored some of the tabs from history. It didn't help to copy over and rename the sessionstore.bak file.

 

I didn't have this much trouble with Chrome, but I had to restore the tabs from history there as well.

 

It's amazing how one small mistake can make you spend so much time on resolving a problem that should not have happened in the first place, had the Ccleaner software been designed better. I urge you to change this behaviour in CCleaner. One simple confirmation dialog box before it actually starts destroying my application data would not hurt. Or at least an option to set this behaviour in settings. Right now I am about to uninstall CCleaner. Not just because of this, I rarely use it anyway. I prefer to keep this type of application data whenever possible, rather than remove it.

 

Cheers!

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So far as I was aware it is the user's choice to enable the "Run CCleaner" option to the Recycle Bin context menu.

 

Your accident should not have happened had the normal installation defaults applied when CCleaner was installed.

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It does not. The only "logging" you'll ever see is what's displayed in CCleaner, such as what it found or removed.

Is there a good reason for this?...

 

Perhaps it's because it would be contradictory to its mission, namely to keep the computer clean? :rolleyes:

 

So far as I was aware it is the user's choice to enable the "Run CCleaner" option to the Recycle Bin context menu.

 

Your accident should not have happened had the normal installation defaults applied when CCleaner was installed.

 

That is not true my good man. I don't remember making any changes to the settings. I just had the latest version of CCleaner installed just to put this to the test. It defaults to having this option enabled. My memory serves me well. Check the screenshots for reference.

 

I installed version 3.21.1767 but I previously had an earlier version, like version 3.0x something. It was not a much older version than the most current version. It could be that the default settings were changed since that version, but I wouldn't expect it to.

 

In either way, what I meant was that CCleaner should ask you if you really want to do this. So that when you click the "Run CCleaner" option over the recycle bin CCleaner starts and then says something like "Wait a minute mate! You are about to delete all your application data! Are you sure you're 100% sober? Are you really really sure you want to do this?" This would at least given me a chance to regret the "run ccleaner" operation. Those who can't stand prompts like this should be able to disable this in settings.

 

Mistakes like this do happen and they always will. But the way I see it is that the software can be designed more intelligently (predictively) to avoid this kind of thing.

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Is there a good reason for this?...

 

Perhaps it's because it would be contradictory to its mission, namely to keep the computer clean? :rolleyes:

 

I don't know why they never included a way to log what it has done, although the question has been asked several times over the years about if it creates a log, but it doesn't.

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Well you can manually create a log before cleaning, so possibly this could be included as an option. There's probably some fancy way of tweaking this, but over to those who know how.

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it doesn't automatically create a log because ccleaner's whole point is to remove junk, such as logs, not create it.

 

ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION

DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF.

Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark)

ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T.

Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US

Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com

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