With the fast development of mobile technology, people are more likely to do things on their portable smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. For iOS users, safari browser history haves saved plenty of time to search on the Internet by keeping all the website addresses visited previously on the devices.
Generally, all personal and important data stored on the phone is safe except for rare cases such as loss of your phone, memory wideout, jail-breaking went wrong, or maybe even a virus.
Apple describes the data you can back up to iCloud or iTunes, and Safari history isn’t one of them. But when we access the iCloud backup using an iCloud backup viewer, we found iCloud does backup Safari history as well. Below are some methods you can rely on in times of circumstances where you lost your history mysteriously.
Retrieve Deleted Safari History in iPhone’s Settings
The easiest and straightforward way of recovering history in iPhone’s Safari is to find and get the links of your browsing webpages in Safari Website Data under Settings.
iPhone keeps the website data for a month, you can check the deleted website data within the last period of 30 days.
Step 1. Go to Settings on your Apple devices.
Step 2. Scroll down the list to find and tap Safari.
Step 3. Click the Advanced option at the bottom of the page.
Step 4. Tap Website Data, and you can now find some deleted Safari browser history listed there. Choose the useful ones and then restore them to your iPhone.
Recover Deleted Safari History on iPhone from iCloud Backup
Restore Safari History from iPhone Backup in iCloud.
Safari history makes it easy to access the website you’ve visited before. You have 5 GB of free storage space for iCloud backup that can be used to back up photos, videos, messages, purchased music, movies, apps, books, TV shows history.
To prevent data loss, many people tend to back up their iOS data regularly.
However, Apple misses a useful feature, and that is to be able to view the Content on iCloud Backup.
That means, when you are going to restore Safari history from iCloud, you cannot be sure if the required items are in the iCloud backup file, or in which backup file they are.
Check if iCloud Backs up Safari History
To find out what data iCloud will back up on your iOS device:
Go to Settings > Tap on your profile card at the top > Tap on iCloud.
Various contents are displayed under your iCloud account, including Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari, Notes, etc. This shows all the personal data have already synced in the iCloud backup as long as you have enabled them.
In this list, make sure Safari backup is enabled.
It also keeps your device syncing details pertaining to Safari’s saved bookmarks, reading list, favorites, and history folders with other computers and iOS mobile devices, linked to the same Apple ID/iCloud account.
How to View the Safari History on iCloud Backup
The following is a simple step-by-step formula to back up Safari history on iCloud.
- Log in to your iCloud account at icloud.com in any web browser installed on your computer.
- Click on the Settings icon, then move to the bottom and click on the Restore Bookmark option under the Advanced section.
- A list of Safari archives should be displayed. Choose any containing the deleted history, and then click the Restore button.
- Click Restore again to verify. Keep iPhone connected to Wi-Fi and wait till the restoration time gets done. And the deleted web history should be restored in Safari app on the iPhone.
Recover Deleted Safari History on iPhone via iTunes Backup
If you are fortunate enough that you have set an iTunes backup, you can easily do Safari history recovery.
Using Apple’s iTunes
The iTunes backup method is another vital method to get the deleted Safari history back on the iPhone, provided that you did a backup of iPhone data in the iTunes library.
1. Connect iPhone to computer and run iTunes in the latest version.
2. Click on the Device icon in the upper left corner of the window, then click the Summary tab from the left list.
3. On the right pane there is the Restore Backup option in the Backups portion, click on it, and then choose a backup which you tend to restore Safari history from.
4. Click the Restore Backup button and wait for the backup to complete.
All files in the backup together with deleted Safari history will be recovered and saved back into their original location on iPhone. You can check the URLs of your browsing history in the Safari browser.
The only downside of using both iTunes and iCloud is that it does get you into the trouble of compromising all other current data saved on the device, and thus you may lose more.
How do I delete Safari history on iCloud?
On your iOS device, go to Settings. Click on Safari. Scroll down to Clear history and website data. Tap it, then tap Clear History and Data to confirm.
Final Thoughts
In order to make sure you have an iCloud backup enabled, go to Settings>iCloud>find Safari>Turn it on>Backup>Toggle the slider on>Tap on iCloud Backup. This will sync all the Safari history and bookmarks to iCloud.
Above are the effective methods to restore deleted Safari history on iPhone. Also, you can rely on them to find other commonly-used iOS files back, such as contacts, videos, photos, reminders, calendars, and more.
You can recover and see deleted history on your iPhone from iTunes and iCloud backup, all the present data are to be deleted in order to restore the previous state with the history you are looking for.
There are also third-party software products that do the recovery, but it’s not recommended due to security cautions. Those software products require access to browser data. The browsing history, however, is recovered successfully without affecting or losing any stuff on your iPhone.