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It just deleted everything before 5 months ago. Ugh
The old versions always archived up the history index files like "History Index 2011-09".
But now "History Index 2011-09" has a very small file size - meaning that it deleted practically everything - as I can now see when I use the Chrome Extension History Calendar.
Alternatively, couldn't History Calendar be deleting my old history entries?
A long time ago (pretty much since Chrome first came out), users noticed that its history files were getting really, really, really big. Chrome’s history files were growing massive compared to every other browser.
It turned out that it was because Chrome not only logs the URL of every page you visit to the history, but the contents of those pages. That way, when you do a search of the history, you can find pages based on keywords from the pages as well. This is a nifty feature, but it also means that the history files are very big.
People complained. A lot. Google’s solution was to keep only the detailed history for the past few months and delete everything before that.
But worry not, even though the detailed monthly history files (those containing the contents of the pages visited) are erased, the actual URLs, titles, dates, etc. (i.e., the data that other browsers store in the history) are retained in the main history file History and Archived History.
If you really need to keep a history of the page contents so that you can do keyword history searching, then you can simply move the files somewhere else every month. Just be aware that using them is tricky because once you move it to your user-data directory and run Chrome, it will erase anything that is too old, so you will need to copy it, not move it.
For what it’s worth, on my main system where I have been using Chrome/Chromium since the very first version, I manually archive the monthly history files. Each month, I use Sqlite (sqlite3.exe) to load the previous month’s history database, run pragma integrity check to test it for corruption, run vacuum to clear optimize and shrink it, check its integrity again. Then I compress it with 7-Zip set to maximum compression, move the .7z file to an archive folder, and delete the original. This way, I keep all of the content history files in case I need them without wasting too much disk space.
