![Firefox logo](https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/products/2020-04-14-08-36-13-8dda6f.png)
firefox won't restore after win 7 crash
Hi,
I have the following problem: Windows 7 crashed after coming back from standby. When I restarted Firefox it restored a 3-month-old session. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file was missing in the profile folder. I searched for a backup in the sessionstore-backups folder; unfortunately all were too old. Windows Restore was not running on my computer.
Using EaseUS Data Recovery I found a recovery.baklz4 file from 10 days ago, tried renaming it etc. but Firefox won't use it for recovering. It is probably corrupt ...
I used https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html but I get an error saying: Session history file contents could not be read?
Is there any way to repair the file or extract the URLs to use them manually?
Or any other solution is very welcome! Thank you very much!
All Replies (6)
Usually Firefox creates a session history snapshot file after each update, but those were missing or too old?
The other thing would be to check the Previous Versions tab in Windows Explorer. I no longer have Windows 7, but the way I remember it is: After opening the sessionstore-backups folder, right-click recovery.jsonlz4 and click Properties. Then look for a Previous Versions tab. If you find something you want to check in the Scrounger, send it to a different location rather than replacing the live file. Repeat with the .baklz4 and previous.jsonlz4, and when Firefox is closed, repeat with the sessionstore.jsonlz4 at the main level of the profile folder. Maybe one of those will be recent enough to be worth looking at.
This is why I started making my own copy of the sessionstore-backup folder. I noticed sometime ago that the contents of the folder was erased by Nightly.
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer said
Usually Firefox creates a session history snapshot file after each update, but those were missing or too old? The other thing would be to check the Previous Versions tab in Windows Explorer. I no longer have Windows 7, but the way I remember it is: After opening the sessionstore-backups folder, right-click recovery.jsonlz4 and click Properties. Then look for a Previous Versions tab. If you find something you want to check in the Scrounger, send it to a different location rather than replacing the live file. Repeat with the .baklz4 and previous.jsonlz4, and when Firefox is closed, repeat with the sessionstore.jsonlz4 at the main level of the profile folder. Maybe one of those will be recent enough to be worth looking at.
Dear jscher2000, Thanks for the quick answer!
The update sessions are there, but also too old. Because Windows Restore is not working (checked, but it has a Volume-Shadow-Copy-Service-VSS error) there are no previous versions of any files.
Is there any way to repair the file I have found? Or just to extract the URLs from this file?
Thanks!
As you know, the .jsonlz4 files are compressed with Mozilla's flavor of LZ4 compression. The first thing the Scrounger does is try to decompress the file, and then fill in the file contents into the box (you can verify how it works with a different file for testing). If that first step doesn't work, I don't know how you can extract anything useful from the file.
Did you check that you haven't changed to an older profile? Is there only one profile?
You can check if you have the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop in case the Refresh feature in Firefox has been used and a new profile has been created.
@jscher2000: Thanks for trying to help!
@cor-el: I checked now. I have only a single profile, the default one. And there is no "Old Firefox Data" folder on the entire computer. I have not used the Reset feature. Thanks!
Any other ideas are welcome! ;-)
Modified