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pinned tabs and all open tabs lost

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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I typically run with about 20-30 tabs open, and occasionally Firefox crashes and I lose everything, so I pinned about my top 10 tabs to make sure I never lose them ---- NOT!

The other day I clicked on a link at the Social Security website. Instead of going to that link directly, or in a new tab as usual, it opened an entire new Firefox window. When I was done with the info there I closed that window so I would only have my usual Firefox window open with my usual tabs.

Tonight Firefox was running REALLY slow. Often if I close it and reopen it things work better, so I closed Firefox (with all my 30 tabs). BUT, when I reopened it - what did I get but the window from the Social Security website that I had viewed and closed a couple days ago, ALL my open tabs were gone. But worst of all, all my PINNED tabs were gone - tabs I had pinned to make sure I never lost them in a crash!

So what happened? I am hugely bummed. I tried searching to see if their is any way to get them back. "Restore Previous Session" is grayed out in my history. Going through months and months of history has allowed me to restore about 6-8 tabs - but my pinned tabs are still lost. The one help item I found told me to save files with the name of sessionstore. I saved a folder called "sessionstore-backups" and within it there are files called "previous.js", "recovery.js" and "recovery.bak" that are all dated today with timestamps from around the time of the failure. But the help items I found don't give me a CLUE how I might use these to recover my lost pins and tabs. Is there any hope? And what is the point of pinning tabs?

I typically run with about 20-30 tabs open, and occasionally Firefox crashes and I lose everything, so I pinned about my top 10 tabs to make sure I never lose them ---- NOT! The other day I clicked on a link at the Social Security website. Instead of going to that link directly, or in a new tab as usual, it opened an entire new Firefox window. When I was done with the info there I closed that window so I would only have my usual Firefox window open with my usual tabs. Tonight Firefox was running REALLY slow. Often if I close it and reopen it things work better, so I closed Firefox (with all my 30 tabs). BUT, when I reopened it - what did I get but the window from the Social Security website that I had viewed and closed a couple days ago, ALL my open tabs were gone. But worst of all, all my PINNED tabs were gone - tabs I had pinned to make sure I never lost them in a crash! So what happened? I am hugely bummed. I tried searching to see if their is any way to get them back. "Restore Previous Session" is grayed out in my history. Going through months and months of history has allowed me to restore about 6-8 tabs - but my pinned tabs are still lost. The one help item I found told me to save files with the name of sessionstore. I saved a folder called "sessionstore-backups" and within it there are files called "previous.js", "recovery.js" and "recovery.bak" that are all dated today with timestamps from around the time of the failure. But the help items I found don't give me a CLUE how I might use these to recover my lost pins and tabs. Is there any hope? And what is the point of pinning tabs?

All Replies (1)

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You can copy a backup from the sessionstore-backups folder to (replace) sessionstore.js in the main profile to use this file to restore the session.

You can look at this post in this MozillaZine forum thread about inspecting a sessionstore file and possibly extract URLs.

See also: