Sign out without losing history

I created a Postman account when I migrated from the Chrome app to the native one in the hopes that it would make the transition smoother. It ended up only really syncing my collections, which I could have just exported to a file and re-imported, and my old history had to become a collection called “History”.

Since then, I haven’t used a single feature of my Postman account. I only use Postman on a single device, which means the only time I remember I even have a Postman account is when this message pops up:
image

This was especially an annoyance when this situation happened, but it’s come up a few other times as well. Any time this happens, Postman renders itself unusable until I sign back in, wasting the handful of seconds I was saving by using Postman instead of just curl.

I’d like to just sign out of my Postman account and forget that it ever existed, but when I try to do that, I’m informed that all my saved data will be deleted. As a very light user of Postman, the feature I use the most is history, sometimes wanting to recall a request I made many months ago. Having my history grouped by date is really handy for this, and I lose that if I export my history to a collection that can be re-imported. History also seems to be the one thing that’s not exported when I create a backup.postman_dump.json file. I see that I can “deactivate Postman Sync,” but I suspect that won’t prevent this “session expired” message from still popping up at random whenever there’s a brief outage of Postman’s systems.

Is there a way that I can sign out of Postman while keeping all my history intact? I’d be fine with copying/editing some stuff in ~/.config/Postman/ or DevTools if that’s the only way to do it; I just don’t want to take the time to blindly poke around at all the files in there. It looks like my history gets saved in IndexedDB, which I’m not terribly familiar with.

Update: it looks like a simple delete localStorage.user in the DevTools console (Ctrl+Shift+I) followed by re-launching Postman did it.

@danh42 Additionally, you also have the option of exporting your data locally via the export option in Settings -> Data -> Export

I just downloaded the latest update to confirm, and that option still does not export history as of version 6.1.4.

@danh42 Apologies for the mixup, the export option does not currently include history. This could be a useful feature request, though :slight_smile:

EDIT:
I’ve added this to our internal tracker

1 Like

I also noticed that updating corrupted my existing history (the very thing I’d like to preserve) by wiping out all the headers associated with my past requests. Since the native client on Linux doesn’t integrate with my package manager, the version I was running was fairly old (4.10.7), so maybe the sudden update to 6.1.4 was too much for it to handle.

Fortunately I took a backup of my config directory immediately before downloading the newer version, so I was able to recover from there and switch back to 4.10.7 without any permanent data loss. I’ll look into updating without losing that data sometime later, since I’ll definitely be very interested in running the latest version whenever Issue 1228 gets addressed.