Safari

Connect

Press “Connect” beside Safari on Exporter’s home. A panel opens on Safari’s folder; press “Select This Folder” without choosing anything, so Exporter may read your history and bookmarks. Then choose where the files go.

Your open tabs, Tab Groups and Safari’s pictures of pages live in a second folder Safari keeps for itself. Press “Connect” beside Tabs on the card and select that folder the same way. Exporter never asks for it at the start.

Choose what syncs

The card has a tab for each list: Kinds (what is written, a file count each), Sites (your history by site), Bookmarks (the folders), Reading List and Tabs (this Mac, your other devices and your Tab Groups). Everything is ticked; untick what you don’t want and its files go.

Where the files go

A folder right in your home folder, like ~/Documents, gets a safari-export folder inside it, with a folder per kind:

• history/2026-10-20.md: a day, a heading per hour, a line per visit, and topics.md beside the days
• bookmarks/Favorites.md: a file per top folder, named as Safari shows it
• reading-list/How compost works.md: a file per page you saved
• tabs/<device>.md and tab-groups/<group>.md: this Mac’s windows and pinned tabs, each other device’s tabs, each Tab Group
• recently-closed/Recently Closed.md, downloads/2026-10.md, top-sites/Top Sites.md, site-settings/Site Settings.md, privacy-report/2026-10.md, watches/<page>.md
• icons/, pictures/ and pages/: the sites’ icons, Safari’s pictures of pages and the pages’ text, when they are included
• csv/: your history a month at a time (history-2026-10.csv), bookmarks.csv, reading-list.csv and downloads.csv, when CSV is included

What each file carries

Ticked under Includes, in Options… on the card or at setup:

• Page Snippets: Safari’s own few lines of each page under its visit or bookmark (macOS 27)
• Topics: the topics Safari tags pages with, on each day and in topics.md with their Wikidata links
• Icons: each site’s icon before its lines, copied once
• Page Pictures, off until ticked: Safari’s picture of each page under its visit or tab, with Safari’s second folder connected
• Page Text, off until ticked: the text of each bookmark and Reading List page in pages/, fetched once on your Mac without your cookies. A page behind a sign-in, a private address or an address with a secret in it is not fetched and its file says why. Your history is never fetched.
• CSV, off until ticked: the history a month at a time, the bookmarks, the Reading List and the downloads as tables in csv/, a row per visit, bookmark, page and download, for Numbers or a spreadsheet

Links and images follow Settings › Markdown: wikilinks or standard Markdown.

Free and unlocked

The newest 10 days of history are free, and so are your bookmarks and Reading List, whole. Unlock Safari is one purchase for the rest: all your history, tabs, Tab Groups, Recently Closed, downloads, Top Sites, site settings, the Privacy Report and watches.

Command line

exporter export --source safari --dest <folder> writes the same files into a folder granted on the Command Line card. See the command line.

Problems and fixes

• “That is not Safari’s data folder”: open the panel again and press “Select This Folder” without choosing anything.
• No snippets or topics: they are Safari’s own, on macOS 27, and only for pages Safari has read since.
• A day is missing: Safari keeps about a year of history; a day it forgot keeps its file in your folder.
• Tabs say “Not connected”: connect Safari’s second folder beside Tabs on the card.