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I had multiple windows open, with multiple tabs on each of one.Firfox froze, restarted it but no 'restore previous session' available.How to find the adresses?

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  • Last reply by N_Gi

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I had multiple windows open (many), with multiple tabs on each of one (many).Firefox froze, causing my laptop to freeze. This has happened before. I have restarted my laptop, (running the fedora 27), opened mozilla firefox, but this time the 'restore previous session' from the history tab was not available to click and restore. I have looked at the session restore in the .mozilla directory, but there is no previously stored backup file. Only in the 'datareporting/'archived/2018-10 directory I see several jsonlz4 files dated since October 1st 2018. Although I have tried to open them with different ways via mozilla I had no success (e.g. copying to sessionrestore directory, renaming them as sessionrestore file, or opening them with an editor just in case there are html adresses stored, etc). In addition I have tried the about: config file, which is is set correctly to restore tabs when I reopen firefox. I have gone through the triple tab, preferences, history options. No success. The only way I can find some addressed is via the history tab--> show all history, but then this is messy, and not all of my tabs are saved. Is there anyway I can find all the windows/tabs I had since today (15/10/2018) morning? Thank you.

I had multiple windows open (many), with multiple tabs on each of one (many).Firefox froze, causing my laptop to freeze. This has happened before. I have restarted my laptop, (running the fedora 27), opened mozilla firefox, but this time the 'restore previous session' from the history tab was not available to click and restore. I have looked at the session restore in the .mozilla directory, but there is no previously stored backup file. Only in the 'datareporting/'archived/2018-10 directory I see several jsonlz4 files dated since October 1st 2018. Although I have tried to open them with different ways via mozilla I had no success (e.g. copying to sessionrestore directory, renaming them as sessionrestore file, or opening them with an editor just in case there are html adresses stored, etc). In addition I have tried the about: config file, which is is set correctly to restore tabs when I reopen firefox. I have gone through the triple tab, preferences, history options. No success. The only way I can find some addressed is via the history tab--> show all history, but then this is messy, and not all of my tabs are saved. Is there anyway I can find all the windows/tabs I had since today (15/10/2018) morning? Thank you.

All Replies (6)

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I assume these didn't list recoverable tabs:

  • History > Recently closed windows
  • History > Recent closed tabs (this is per window)

If necessary you can convert a session history jsonlz4 file to a web page of clickable links using my page here:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

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Thank you jcher2000 for your response. Among my attempts yesterday, has also been to scrounge the file. I did find this webpage (I assume it is the same), within the firefox help file. Unfortunately it did not work. The webpage creates a single line of file, instead of multiple htmls. I have confirmed this again with your url. For example the file I am trying to scrounge is called '1538419018510.65cd6f54-40c3-4036-a1db-05d3fa9af4ce.main.jsonlz4' and it is in the /.mozilla/firefox/rrpwaqka.default-1526355849820/datareporting/archived/2018-10/ Does this make more sense? Here I upload the file. - Actually not, as the uploading is not working. It takes ages to upload for an about 10kB file Thank you for your attention

Modified by N_Gi

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Hi N_Gi, you can't recover URLs from a file in the

[profilefolder]/datareporting/archived/2018-10/

path, those are stats for the "Firefox Health Report".

It would have to be in the

[profilefolder]/sessionstore-backups

path to have session history data in it.

Apologies for not noticing that issue before.

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Dear jscher2000, thank you for your reply,

As I have mentioned yesterday, the only files that exist in the appropriate sessionstore-backups directory are files that are updated every few minutes. The directory does not have any files from crashes. I do have a crash directory which contains this file store.json.mozlz4 since yesterday. I am tempted to scrounge that..., well it is not working.... Any suggestions?

Modified by N_Gi

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I don't know what happened to your session history files. Usually you would find at least one from your last automatic update, but perhaps it depends on whether your Firefox updates itself or that is handled by a package manager.

It sounds like the data is gone.

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Well I have learnt a lot of things, thank you