The Brave history files (~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/History and ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/History-journal) have the extended file attribute com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem by default on macOS.
This attribute prevents them from being backed up by Time Machine. Why was this decision made? Could this decision be reversed, or could a checkbox be added to brave://settings to enable the backing up of these files?
My temporary workaround is to have a cron job that executes xattr -d "com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem" ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/History and xattr -d "com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem" ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/History-journal to remove this attribute on a periodic basis in case updates to Brave add this property back again. However, this is undesirable and should not be a substitution for the potential solutions I mentioned above.
Although not relevant to the issue as this exists regardless of operating system and version, adding this as requested:
Please edit your Original Post (“OP”) above, in order to include:
Brave Browser version numbers
Operating System version numbers
Also, please edit the following:
have the file attribute com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem
changing that to:
have the file’s extended attribute com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem
Apple’s instructions re including / excluding directories, files:
See Why Chrome history is not backed up at:
There, scroll down to:
Although I only use Google Chrome occasionally, I personally get around this limitation by manually backing up the five files not backed up via Time Machine. The five files in question are:
Favicons
Favicons-journal
History
History-journal
previews_opt_out.db-journal
And, you might find the following to be useful → Carbon Copy Cloner for MacOS:
The following software may interest. I used St. Clair Software’s Default Folder application for years. Recently, they have been sending e-mail nudges . . . so today, I took a look at their website and found they have an application, HistoryHound:
Find pages in your Bookmarks or History just by typing words you remember from them!
HistoryHound lets you do a fast keyword search on the entire content of all web pages and RSS feeds you’ve visited recently, plus all those that you’ve bookmarked. It’s a “personal web search.” Just type in a few keywords and HistoryHound gives you a list of pages you’ve viewed recently, ranked by relevance.