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I want to restore the tabs that were open Saturday Feb. 12 2016. Is this possible, and if so, how is it possible for me to do that?

Riesspitts
Riesspitts
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Firefox options that seem to be available include restoration of tabs that were open on numerous previous dates. Instructions seem to indicate that the links in those tabs will replace bookmarks that have been stored. I must be interpreting this option incorrectly, as attempts to restore previously appearing tabs have been unsuccessful. It's a distinct disadvantage that open tabs, waiting for my having time to review pages at those links, disappear sometimes when the computer automatically restarts for updates and can only be restored if they were in the immediately previous session, something which I'm sometimes unable to ensure catching on subsequent restarts of Firefox. So: how can I restore the tabs that were present on a date previous to the most immediately prior set of tabs?

Firefox options that seem to be available include restoration of tabs that were open on numerous previous dates. Instructions seem to indicate that the links in those tabs will replace bookmarks that have been stored. I must be interpreting this option incorrectly, as attempts to restore previously appearing tabs have been unsuccessful. It's a distinct disadvantage that open tabs, waiting for my having time to review pages at those links, disappear sometimes when the computer automatically restarts for updates and can only be restored if they were in the immediately previous session, something which I'm sometimes unable to ensure catching on subsequent restarts of Firefox. So: how can I restore the tabs that were present on a date previous to the most immediately prior set of tabs?

All Replies (3)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Firefox does NOT stores tabs from specific dates, only your immediately previous session. The list of dates under "Restore" refers to bookmarks only, not tabs.

(Firefox does make a snapshot of open tabs when updating, so you might be able to use one of those as mentioned below.)

If you haven't already, please back up your session history files to a safe location for potential recovery/salvage operations, as follows:

Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either

  • "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
  • (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the first table on the page, click the "Show Folder" button.

In the window that launches, scroll down and double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. Save all files here to a safe location, such as your Documents folder.

The kinds of files you may find among your sessionstore files are:

  • recovery.js: the windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session (or, if Firefox just crashed and hasn't been reopened, your last session)
  • recovery.bak: a backup copy of recovery.js
  • previous.js: the windows and tabs in your last Firefox session
  • upgrade.js-build_id: the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update

Could you take a look at what you have and the date/time of the various files to see whether you think any of them would have the tabs from 12 days ago?

Note: By default, Windows hides the .js extension. To ensure that you are looking at the files I mentioned, you may want to turn off that feature. This article has the steps: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-name-extensions

Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer

alan_r
alan_r
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Do you still have history from that date? There could be enough links to get you started. Even much more recent history replaced links could prompt some ideas.

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator
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Unless you happen to be using the Session Manager extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/

Which provides for saving multiple sessions, but never having used that extension I don't know if that is user a initiated 'save' or if that is done automatically all the time; or if that is a user settable feature for "always save" a session.