Introduction
This is a short post that also serves as a personal memo.
Recently, the browsing history in Arc Browser on my Mac suddenly disappeared. As far as I remember, I hadn't deleted anything manually, so it really caught me off guard. Since Arc is the browser I use for work, losing access to frequently visited websites was incredibly frustrating.
Fortunately, I was able to investigate and recover the lost data almost immediately. Here’s a quick summary of the troubleshooting steps I took.
Situation
When I opened Arc and hit Cmd + T to search, I noticed that frequently visited websites weren’t showing up as usual. When I pressed Cmd + Y to check my browsing history, the entire list was completely empty. Restarting the browser didn’t help either. (Interestingly, my bookmarks and cached data were still intact.)
I began investigating and checked the following path in Finder:
~/Library/Application Support/Arc/User Data/Default/History
I noticed that the History file was unusually small—just a few kilobytes—leading me to suspect that the file had somehow become corrupted and was automatically regenerated from scratch upon launch.
What I Did
Assuming the data had been lost, I figured it would be nearly impossible to recover the history without a backup.
Luckily, I’ve been using Backblaze to continuously back up my entire system. So I logged into Backblaze and went through older versions of the History file in hourly increments to try to find a usable backup.
Eventually, I noticed a point in time where the file size of History had changed significantly. Based on that, I suspected the file was either deleted or corrupted around that time. I downloaded the larger version of the file from Backblaze and replaced the local History file with it.
After restarting Arc, my browsing history was successfully restored.
Possible Causes & Preventative Measures
In the end, I couldn’t determine the exact cause. It may have been a browser crash or forced shutdown that corrupted the user data.
I also vaguely recall that Arc might have updated itself recently, and perhaps something went wrong during the update that caused a reset.
Regardless, unexpected issues like this are hard to predict and even harder to prepare for in advance. This incident reminded me how important it is to keep regular and frequent backups—not just daily, but ideally hourly. Even if a future problem stems from a completely different cause, having full system backups gives me the flexibility to restore individual components as needed.
Conclusion
In this case, restoring a previous backup of the History file allowed me to recover everything successfully.
It was a bit of a hassle since I hadn’t expected this at all, but I’m glad I was able to solve the issue without too much trouble. I’ll definitely keep backing up regularly and stay more alert moving forward.
Thanks for reading!
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