How IE Favorites and History are stored on a Windows system

[Ken Ray]

On 2/15/06 8:57 AM, "Eric Chatonet" <eric.chatonet at sosmartsoftware.com>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Even if I work on both Mac and Win, I'm rather a Mac man.
> At the moment I'm puzzled with Win :-(
> I want to retrieve all IE favorites and history from a user on XP AND
> Win 2000.
> I found something about favorites, a .ini file as in:
> 
> [InternetShortcut]
> URL= http:// www......
> WorkingDirectory=C:\....
> ShowCommand=7
> IconIndex=1
> etc.
> 
> But I have no idea about the internal method used for storing history?
> Sure there is someone around there who can help me :-)

Favorites are stored in the folder:

  C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Favorites

and are a series of internet shortcuts or folders.

History is tricky - on Windows XP it's stored in:

  C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\History.IE5

in a file called "index.dat". The "History.IE5" folder is hidden, and you
can't navigate to it from the nromal interface (you end up getting the
shortcuts for "2 weeks ago", "3 weeks ago", etc.). In addition to the
"index.dat" file, there are a bunch of folders, and the "index.dat" file
itself is mostly binary (although you can see most of the urls). What I did
was go to the directory in the shell, and then do a "copy" command to copy
the file to somewhere more accessible (like C:).

I also didn't know if you needed this info, but the "typed urls" (the ones
that are auto-completed and show up in the dropdown menu from the Location
field) are stored in the Registry at:

  HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs


HTH,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com