[Hippo_Man]

My spitfire son has taken to deleting the history on Explorer after every use. I really don't want to spy on him, but I gotta figure he is doing it for a reason. Is there any way to block this, or to recover the history that was deleted?
I don't want to go down the road of spyware, but if so, is there anything out there for Macs?

[car1son]

Are you using OS X? One idea for ad-hoc spyware would be to sudo to root and put a cron job in place to copy the current history file to a directory not accessible to non-root accounts, say at five minute intervals, appending a time stamp to the file name to prevent overwriting. Then peruse the larger entries and clean up the directory at your leisure.
Of course, if he's a really clever spitfire, he might catch you at it (or any other spyware you might install). that might lead to an uncomfortable conversation.

[doggdamac]

Well, you could just tell him, quite FIRMLY:
SON, you have 2 choices:
A) Stop deleting the history and/or visiting sites you shouldn't be visiting anyway
B) Be forever forbidden to use the computer at all
take your choice /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
You don't like it, TOO FRIGGIN BAD !
Oops, I forgot, that would mean you would actually have to stand up and be a REAL parent...
Wasn't that outlawed a few years ago ?

[Philip Michaels]

In reply to:

---

Oops, I forgot, that would mean you would actually have to stand up and be a REAL parent...
Wasn't that outlawed a few years ago ?

---

That was an entirely unneccessary comment.
Keep posts on topic please.

[Naphtali]

You can do it a hard way or an easy way. The easy way is to use NUM or TechTool Pro or other disk maintenance utility that allows you to UNERASE files.
Install software.
Create preferences that protect/track your files.
When you are on the computer, preferably from a different drive, run your UNERASE protocol. When working on files rather than entire drives/partitions, usually you will see an intermediary screen that allows you to select what you want to recover.
Do it.

[schokid02]

There really aren't any spy-ware apps for the mac (which most people consider a good thing). If you are looking to keep your son from deleting the history, then I think you might be able to just lock the prefs file. I'll need some more experienced users to key in on this, but you should be able to change the permissions on that one file (or the folder) so that he can't delete the history and only you would have access to it.

[doggdamac]

Rugrat rules:
A) My house
B) My electricity
C) My computer = my rules
YOU do the math /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

[Philip Michaels]

These last two posts have been edited to remove the name calling.