Recently, Safari has stopped saving my browsing history. I have always had my Preferences set for "Remove history items: After one year". The only changes in my browsing habits have been:

• A few weeks ago I started using "New Private Window", but only when visiting sensitive sites like banking or investing accounts.

* About a week ago I added the Preference: "Prevent cross-site tracking"

Safari keeps the history during a browsing session but clears everything when the browser is closed.

Anyone else having this issue?

Have you by any chance checked the applicable box in your Cookie pane?

To add to Artie's suggestion: Have you recently tweaked Safari settings in an app like TinkerTool or OnyX?

I don't understand the question. My Cookie pane has a number of sites that are checked off as being okay to keep cookies. To date Safari has kept a history all browser site visits, whether in the Cookie list or not. Now, on closing, it wipes everything.

Nope. Any application tweaks I make are always within the applications.

I'm talking about this section of the pane.

Well, I'll be...... That seems to have done it although I don't recall checking that box....but I guess I must have. Thanks for the help. If it's only been erasing session by session history since the box was checked, I wonder if all the previous history is available and loadable.

...best of my knowledge, whatever history you were saving is now GONE, although you can probably restore it up to a point from your most recent clone.

How badly do you want the history? Files like that are not backed up by Time Machine, but if they haven't been overwritten, they may still be on the drive although deleted from the directory structure. If you want the history badly enough a file recovery utility such as Tech Tool Pro might be able to recover it. In the meantime, quit using your computer or you risk overwriting the files.

It's not a show-stopper. Periodically I refer to the browser history as an easy way to relocate a site that I've forgot....sort of like a browser time machine. However, it's not worth restoring unless really easy.

~/Library/Safari/History.db
~/Library/Safari/History.db-shm
~/Library/Safari/History\.db\-wal

are the files in which your history is stored; replacing your current ones with the same ones from your most recent clone seems like it ought to get you back to that point but cost you what's happened since then.

Don't delete your current files until you're sure of both what you've got and that it's what you want/prefer.

Thanks for the layman's guide....I'll take a peek.