What happened to my browsing history?

Sierra apparently installed an update sometime yesterday evening and my system has been acting oddly ever since. I keep a few online sites logged into so I do not have to log in every time, but they were all logged out when I accessed them today. My browsing history appears to have disappeared from the History entry in Safari and the files, which I assume contain that history, are mostly too small to actually contain any portion other than for today. Two files appear big enough to contain something useful, but one has a creation date of 2040, which is a bit puzzling and the other is the History.db file and I have no idea how to open that. Given all of that, I have some questions:

1. Is there a way for me to turn off OS updates? It was turned off in Apple Preferences (install Mac OS Updates is not checked in Preferences) but the OS installed the update anyway.

2. Is there any way for me to see what was installed? The Updates entry in the App Store is now completely clear with no update history shown.

3. The only file of any size in the user Library/Safari is History.db (mentioned above) but I have no idea how to manually open the database file to find my history. I assume it is some kind of SQL file but I am not sure. If there is a reader for the file I would appreciate knowing what that app is.

4. Safari's History pull-down shows two dates for history - Saturday, April 22, 2017 (today) and Sunday, December 16, 2040 which, interestingly enough, actually shows some sites visited.

Of course I generally have no interest in my browsing history but found all of this because I wanted to locate a website I accidentally found yesterday and now all of that information seems to have evaporated into the ether (or into the inaccessible History.db file). Any help would be appreciated.

If you look in the Mac App Store, on the Updates page, what update was installed? If updates was turned off in System Preferences > App Store, then the update would not have installed.

Make sure you are signed in in System Preferences > iCloud with your Apple ID.

ferrarr said:

If you look in the Mac App Store, on the Updates page, what update was installed? If updates was turned off in System Preferences > App Store, then the update would not have installed.

Make sure you are signed in in System Preferences > iCloud with your Apple ID.

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1. I am signed into iCloud with my Apple ID,

2. The App Store Update page only tells me that there are no updates available. All update history is gone (along with my Safari browsing history I suppose),

3. Apple Preferences is set as described in my post. Install Mac OS updates is unchecked, but Apple installed the update anyway and it is not listed in the App Store history (and neither are my app updates, like the recent update to Xcode). No updates are listed.

My whole system is now working in an odd fashion and not even my wallpaper is working as setup. The images display, but now never change unless I manually open the Preferences dialog box and uncheck and then recheck some entry. It then changes immediately, but doesn't change after that unless I again open the dialog box and change something.

There have been no Sierra updates at all this month. Apps from the App Store which require updating just have the unit 1 or whatever when you enter App Store > Updates.

harryb2448 said:

There have been no Sierra updates at all this month. Apps from the App Store which require updating just have the unit 1 or whatever when you enter App Store > Updates.

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All that I can tell you is that yesterday, after I finished some work and went outside for a bit, I returned and found the Mini displaying a screen with one of those progress bars that said the OS was being updated. It did not tell me what update was being installed, but after that everything started to work very oddly. I was logged out of web pages that normally keep me logged in, my desktop wallpaper stopped changing images as it was set to do (on both screens), my Safari history disappeared and things just no longer worked properly.

The Updates page in the App Store used to show me all of the update history, but no longer. All it now says is that no updates are available. The last time I looked at my Safari OS level it was 10.12.3 but it is now 10.12.4. I know that update is dated as of last month but I have my system set to not automatically install OS updates so it should not have been installed last month without my approval.

Most of this would just be an annoyance if I knew some way to open the History.db file because the lack of that history is what has been causing me the most trouble.

So I think we can say that there are three things not working properly and maybe more you have not discovered yet.
I suggest that you switch your device off completely and reboot holding the Command and R keys until the grey screen with the central dialogue box appears.
In that box you will see at the bottom Disc Utility, click that, select Macintosh HD in the side menu and run First Aid from the tab at the top.
This will tell you if you have a system or software error.
If you get an all clear you can go to the Apple Menu and restart. Shut down and reboot in itself fixes a surprising amount of issues.
Check the App Store and see if your download and update history is now complete.
If not let us know.
I suspect that there was no update, especially considering what you have told us about your settings, but that the device simply rebooted which is indicative of other problems.

Rod Sprague said:

So I think we can say that there are three things not working properly and maybe more you have not discovered yet.
I suggest that you switch your device off completely and reboot holding the Command and R keys until the grey screen with the central dialogue box appears.
In that box you will see at the bottom Disc Utility, click that, select Macintosh HD in the side menu and run First Aid from the tab at the top.
This will tell you if you have a system or software error.
If you get an all clear you can go to the Apple Menu and restart. Shut down and reboot in itself fixes a surprising amount of issues.
Check the App Store and see if your download and update history is now complete.
If not let us know.
I suspect that there was no update, especially considering what you have told us about your settings, but that the device simply rebooted which is indicative of other problems.

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It is evening here now so I will try this in the morning. At the very least it is unlikely that the process would cause any more problems. It is probably worth mentioning that I shut down my machine almost every night. I have caught a lot of flack from some posters saying that there is no need, but it is also true that shutting down should not cause any problems so, other than the additional startup time, I see no real downside to shutting down. I mention this because I had to do a cold boot this morning after whatever happened on my machine last night.

As to whether or not an actual update got installed, all I can say is that I had a screen saying that the update was being installed. I suppose it is possible that there was no update or that some update was being installed a second time (although I am not sure how that would happen), but I had to sit through the progress bar moving across the screen until the system came back to life.

Perhaps most importantly almost all of the OS related apps in my Applications folder now have the date 4/20/2017 and that indicates to me that an update did actually occur. It is hard for me to see why all of those OS apps would have a date of 2 days ago if the system had not been updated yesterday.

I will post whatever I find tomorrow after this process.

Look forward to hearing back from you. If the screen actually said that an update was being installed then I guess we can't argue with that. The question becomes how and why? Do you have "Automatically Install System Data files and Security Updates" ticked in App Store preferences?
As for the daily shutdown in my opinion it decreases the overall life of your HD.

NVRAM reset and SMC reset.

Rod Sprague said:

Look forward to hearing back from you. If the screen actually said that an update was being installed then I guess we can't argue with that. The question becomes how and why? Do you have "Automatically Install System Data files and Security Updates" ticked in App Store preferences?
As for the daily shutdown in my opinion it decreases the overall life of your HD.

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I went through the repair process, which completed properly, but it did not fix this issue. In fact my Safari history now only lists yesterday and Dec 18, 2040. The day before yesterday appears to be gone.

As for the cold start harming my hard drive, I suppose I might agree if I had a physical hard drive but my system uses an ssd and I don't think that the ssd is harmed by the boot process other than an additional access. I have read that there are only so many accesses that a solid state drive can allow before it starts to fail, but that the number is high enough that I don't really have to worry about it. Perhaps, if I expect to be using this machine to access the sites listed as having been accessed on Dec 18, 2040, on that date, I might be more worried.

Of course I might be wrong about that as I have no real information on the effect of restarts on a solid state drive.

I gather from some of the posts that there might be some question about whether or not I was inventing some of this information so I have attached some screen shots showing the update date for my OS apps and the state of the Update screen from the App Store. As you can see all of the update history is missing as well.

Rod Sprague said:

As for the daily shutdown in my opinion it decreases the overall life of your HD.

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Based on personal experience, I respectfully disagree. I have kept all of my Macs for 8 years or more, and shut them down almost every day. I have always replaced them due to software becoming outdated, not hard drive failure. I believe that one can find a more technical analysis that indicates that this is somewhat of an "urban legend".

Not an urban legend. The science behind it is that at power on (and off) there are current surges in the electronics as the components get to the working state. In particular, any capacitor has to charge up from the incoming current, so while that is happening (milliseconds), whatever function that capacitor has in controlling and regulating the circuit is not functioning correctly. And motors, particularly drive motors and head movement motors, suffer from that same inrush of current as the magnetic fields build up to working levels and offer the designed impedance to the current flow. So, with all of that going on in the first few milliseconds, the current flow is much higher than in a steady state. And that high current can cause weakened components to fail. A component that "works" as long as the current is stable can totally fail during that brief inrush. That's why light bulbs blow more often as you turn them on than when they are just on, and why your HVAC compressor dies when it is first under a load, not in the middle of a cycle. The extra stress of that inrush exposes the weakness.

It's not urban legend, it's science. Just search for "inrush current" with your search engine of choice and see how many technical publications address the issue.

That said, whether or not you shut down is up to you. I have one Mac that has not been powered off (except when the mains and UPS both failed once) for 8 years. I controls my home automation system and is on 24/7. And I do not shut off any of my Macs at night. I just let them sleep. Ditto for my external drives and network drives. As usual, YMMV applies.

Very interesting and well-articulated theory there. What is required by a scientific inquiry is testing, not of an analogy, but the actual equipment. My real-world test, mentioned above, lacks data, thus is just anecdotal.

Science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inrush_current
https://www.ametherm.com/inrush-current/
http://www.electronicdesign.com/power/limit-inrush-current-ac-dc-power-supplies-and-rectifiers
http://www.murata.com/products/emiconfun/emc/2012/10/29/en-20121029-p1
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva670a/slva670a.pdf
http://www.ece.mtu.edu/faculty/bamork/ee5220/Inrush.pdf
http://www.testusb.com/inrush_issue.htm

If you want more, as I said, do a quick search for "inrush current." It's not theory, it's engineering.

What I would be interested in is data from tests conducted on computers, not general electronic theory.

I don't know how to break it to you, but computers ARE general electronics.

You left out the key word.
We'll just have to agree that we disagree. My real world experience still stands, and is valid, but isolated. What I demand as proof, one way other the other, as stated already, is data from tests of the theory on multiple computers, preferably Macs. I have read articles, or at least one, that says yeah, all that science stuff, but it won't really impact your computer. I'm not gonna try to dig it up; you'll just have to take my word for it.