NetMute
“What did January look like” now has an answer
The history window used to be a fixed 90 days. That is enough to compare this month with last month, and not enough for anything seasonal: a trip, a project, the month you installed the app you are now suspicious of.
The window is now yours to set: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years. The default moved to one year.
What is kept, precisely
NetMute keeps daily totals for the whole window: per day, per app, how much went where. That is what makes a year affordable to store on a laptop and what the monthly and yearly views are built from.
It is worth being exact about what that is not. It is not a full packet log, and it is not an interactive timeline you can scrub across twelve months connection by connection. A year of daily totals answers “how much, which app, which direction, when”, not “which individual connection at 14:32 on a Tuesday in January”.
One more detail worth stating: the domain list itself is tidied after half a year without contact. The daily totals keep the full window; a domain nothing has talked to since spring does not stay in the list forever.
All of it stays on your Mac.
When a longer window matters
A yearly comparison after a trip, when the data question is really a roaming-bill question.
An app whose behaviour changed: with a year of daily totals, the month it changed is visible, and that usually identifies the update responsible.
Seasonal work, where the honest comparison is with the same period last year rather than with last month.
Retention is a choice, so it is shown as one
Longer history means more insight and more data about you sitting on your disk. That is a real trade-off, so it is a setting rather than a decision made for you, and 2 years is available for people who want it, not the default.
Shortening the window asks first, in plain words, because it deletes irreversibly: picking 3 months after a year of use throws away nine months that cannot be recovered. It is your data and your call, and NetMute makes sure it is a call you actually made.
Key benefits
- 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years: you choose
- One year by default, up from a fixed 90 days
- Daily totals per app for the whole window
- Stored on your Mac; nothing is uploaded for long-term storage
- Shortening the window asks for confirmation before it deletes
Frequently Asked Questions about Connection History
Does a longer history make NetMute slower or bigger?
It stores daily totals rather than individual connections, so the growth is modest and predictable. A year is the default precisely because it is comfortable on a normal Mac.
What happens if I shorten the window?
Everything older than the new window is deleted, and it cannot be recovered, so NetMute asks first and says exactly what will go.
Can I see every individual connection from ten months ago?
No. The long window keeps daily totals per app, not a connection-by-connection log. It answers how much, which app and when, not which individual connection at a given minute.