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Restore (very) old non-saved Firefox session.

sebgro95
sebgro95
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A year ago Windows forced an update (that I'd been delaying a long time) while my computer was asleep. My tabs that usually automatically restored, didn't do so as usual. Didn't know if I could restore it (though knew it might be possible), but I was too busy at the time to learn it. Just had to accept it was gone to get done with my tasks the coming weeks. Sorry, long story. The problem: It happened again now, but I succesfully restored the session from sessionstore-backups with the .jsonlz4 file. Question is: I would like to restore last years session too. In the sessionstore-backups folder I can only find files from a month back. Is it ANY way to restore/find the URLs in the active tabs, from last year. I know it's a long shot, but it was VERY important to me! Thank you my fellow foxes.

A year ago Windows forced an update (that I'd been delaying a long time) while my computer was asleep. My tabs that usually automatically restored, didn't do so as usual. Didn't know if I could restore it (though knew it might be possible), but I was too busy at the time to learn it. Just had to accept it was gone to get done with my tasks the coming weeks. Sorry, long story. The problem: It happened again now, but I succesfully restored the session from sessionstore-backups with the .jsonlz4 file. Question is: I would like to restore last years session too. In the sessionstore-backups folder I can only find files from a month back. Is it ANY way to restore/find the URLs in the active tabs, from last year. I know it's a long shot, but it was VERY important to me! Thank you my fellow foxes.

All Replies (1)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Longshot is an understatement! Do you make backups?

At any point in the past year did your Firefox perform a Refresh? That creates an Old Firefox Data folder on your desktop, so old files would have been in there instead of your current profile folder.

Aside from the files visible in the current sessionstore-backups folder, you might find shadow copies in a restore point (maybe up to 3 months back) and deleted copies that could be extracted using Recuva (potentially further back but more likely to be corrupted). Here are some links to relevant tools:

How to find shadow copies

Please do not use the Windows Session Restore feature; that can lead to worse problems. However, you can use a utility program to look inside the snapshot data used by that feature and pull out interesting files. Here are the steps:

(a) Set Windows to show hidden files and folders:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14201/windows-show-hidden-files

(b) Download and run one of these two programs:

Within the older restore points shown in the program, you can explore along this path to see whether you can find a shadow copy of your profile:

\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

(c) Check in the sessionstore-backups folder for older backups. You can export interesting files to a convenient location such as your currently live desktop. If a snapshot was captured while Firefox was closed, there may be a sessionstore.jsonlz4 file at the main level of the profile folder you could export.

Then you can use the Scrounger tool to view their contents.

Anything interesting?

Unerasing Deleted Files

Usually this doesn't work if you have used your hard drive much since the erasure, but you never know:

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

The files you're looking for would most likely have been deleted from the sessionstore-backups folder. However, if you find sessionstore.jsonlz4 remnants from the main level of the profile folder, those could be interesting as well.