Extracting Brave browsing history

alex

— 1 min read

As part of building my personal cloud, I wanted to back up my browser history. This is useful for info mining and search purposes, but also because Brave (or Chromium?) starts dropping data after 90 days. Who knew. The 90 day limit is hard-coded, so data loss is unavoidable without an export.

This one gets into the technical weeds, skip if SQL puts you to sleep.

So first, the location. On Macs this is ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/[Default || Profile N]/History/brave_history.sqlite. For chrome, the location is similar ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Google/Chrome/[Default || Profile N]/History.

The history is kept in a sqlite database, either brave_history.sqlite or History. It's usually locked while the browser process is running, but a quick hack is to make a copy of the file to a temp location to make it read/write-able.

From there, the usual sqlite exploration tools work. I recommend litecli, by the same folks behind the excellent pgcli. An example query to extract browsing history into denormalized rows to throw into a csv or what have you:

select
  v.id,
  v.visit_time,
  u.url as url,
  u.title as url_title
from
  visits v
inner join urls u
  on v.url = u.id;

A quick note on visit_time: it is not milliseconds from unix epoch, as I had initially expected. It's actually microseconds from the win32 epoch, which is Jan 1 1601 00:00:00 UTC. To get to unix epoch millis, subtract 11644473600000000 from visit_time and divide by 1000.

Read more