Monday 28 June 2010

Safari Internet History round up

The last few posts all concern the recovery of internet history created by the Safari browser. I like to think of internet history in the wider sense and consider any artefact that demonstrates that a user visited a URL at a particular time.

Recovering Safari browser history from unallocated deals with history.
Safari browser cache -examination of Cache.db deals with the cache.
Never mind the cookies lets carve the crumbs - Safari Cookie stuff looks at Cookies.
Safari History - spotlight webhistory artefacts examines Spotlight snapshots of web pages accessed with Safari.

To round things up I will briefly list some other files or locations that may provide internet history created by the Safari browser (the ~ denotes the path is within a user profile)

~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist
Used to store details of the last browser session allowing a user to select Reopen All Windows from Last Session from the safari history menu.

~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db
~/Library/Safari/Icons.db

Used to store the associations between websites and their favicons.

~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist
~/Library/PubSub/Feeds/............... .xml
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews

TopSites is a gallery of recently visited web sites. The binary TopSites.plist details the websites featured in this gallery. The image representing each webpage is stored within the Webpage Previews folder. This folder also stores any Quicklook representation of a webpage, for example when managing Bookmarks or reviewing History. File names of files in the Webpage Previews folder are the MD5 of the associated URL. Safari monitors whether a page has altered since it was last viewed and appends a blue star to the TopSites view for those sites that have. The xml files in PubSub/Feeds are connected with the monitoring.

~/Library/Safari/Downloads.plist
An xml plist the contents of which are self explanatory.
~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist
A binary plist that may be connected to Safari spotlight web history artefacts.




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