It is common for users clear the browsing history in your browser With some frequency. But, it may happen that on some occasion you have realized that you have lost a website that you wanted to access and whose name you do not remember. In this case, we still have some possibility of recovering those websites that you have visited. There are a couple of methods that we can use to achieve this.
Since on our hard drive a copy is stored with all the web pages we have visited. In addition, even if we have deleted the browsing history in the browser we use, this copy is still there. So it is something that can be of great help to us at all times.
As we have said, there are two methods with which be able to retrieve these pages in case you have deleted the history. We do not have to install anything in either case. We will simply have to use some tools on our computer.
Access the history on the hard drive
As we have told you at the beginning of the article, a copy of your browsing history is saved on the hard drive. So you will be able to see all the web pages that you have visited using it. We will be able to open this history that we have saved in a simple way with the notepad. Although it does not offer the best visualization, we will be able to easily recognize the addresses of these pages. So it will not be a problem.
Depending on the browser you use, you will have a different address. We leave you with the main addresses depending on the browser that you use:
- Google Chrome: Inside the folder C: \ Users (username) \ AppData \ Local \ Google \ Chrome \ User Data \ Default, you have to find and open the file called History.
- Mozilla Firefox: In C: \ Users (username) \ AppData \ Roaming \ Mozilla \ Firefox \ Profiles \, the file called places. sqlite.
- Internet Explorer and Edge: Within C: \ Users (username) \ AppData \ Local \ Microsoft \ Windows \ History, in this case files are generated for the history every day.
Access to this data it greatly depends on the browser you use on your computer. There are browsers in which it is very simple, as in Chrome. But in the case of Firefox it is somewhat more complicated to use this method. Also, if it doesn't work this way, you can always use programs to recover files.
It is common for users to have a file recovery program on their computer, such as Recuva. With them, it is possible to recover said browsing history. You have to scan the specific addresses in which these histories are stored (those that appear above). You may be able to find something, although there are no guarantees in this regard that you will be successful.
DNS cache
The second method that we can use to retrieve said history It supposes to make use of the DNS cache. When you enter a web page, the browser connects to these DNS servers, where the IP is received. That is why in the cache of these DNS we find a record of the pages we have visited. In Windows, we can access this data.
For that, we are going to use the command prompt. Therefore, we first open a command prompt window. We can do it in two ways: From the start menu, typing cmd or using the Win + R key combination and a run window opens in which you must type cmd. Both ways cause that command prompt to open.
So, when it has already opened on the screen, you have to write the command ipconfig / displaydns on the screen and then press enter. In this way, the last web pages you have visited will be shown on the screen. If you want to locate a specific page in that history, you can use the Control + F key combination and search for that website. It's that simple to access these pages, even after you've cleared the history.