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Restore lost tabs after crash when restore previous tabs methods aren't working

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  • Last reply by Josh

Josh
Josh
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Hello! My computer crashed recently ending my Firefox browsing session along with the 3 windows and likely close to 50 combined tabs I had open. Upon re-opening Firefox I'm pretty sure I clicked "Restore previous session" on the page that pops up with that prompt as I normally do expecting all previous windows and tabs to reappear, but for some reason it didn't load as usual and instead reloaded a new window saying that I'm on the latest version of Firefox with 1 additional blank homepage tab instead of my previous 3 windows with multiple tabs. In that new window the "Restore previous session" option from the menu bar was greyed out and nothing appeared in the "Recently closed windows" or "Recently closed tabs" areas. I ended the new window using the End Task feature in Task Manager and have not opened Firefox back up in hope of being able to recover the now 2 (or I guess 3 if the restore re-load is considered a new session) sessions ago windows/tabs.

I have tried 2 methods to get my previous tabs back: 1) sessionstore-backups subfolder in the Profiles folder - the recovery.jsonlz4/baklz4 are both from the newer blank tab session, the previous.jsonlz4 is from 2 months ago, and the upgrade.jsonlz4 files are also older from 2 months ago so none of those files have the data I'm looking for 2) ShadowExplorer to find an older version of the sessionstore-backups, but this too did not have helpful files from either the recovery/previous/upgrades file types after extracting and seeing only 3 tabs from the older session they logged

Before reopening Firefox again, is there any other method or attempt I should try to restore the now 2 sessions back 3 windows and their tabs? Any relevant help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hello! My computer crashed recently ending my Firefox browsing session along with the 3 windows and likely close to 50 combined tabs I had open. Upon re-opening Firefox I'm pretty sure I clicked "Restore previous session" on the page that pops up with that prompt as I normally do expecting all previous windows and tabs to reappear, but for some reason it didn't load as usual and instead reloaded a new window saying that I'm on the latest version of Firefox with 1 additional blank homepage tab instead of my previous 3 windows with multiple tabs. In that new window the "Restore previous session" option from the menu bar was greyed out and nothing appeared in the "Recently closed windows" or "Recently closed tabs" areas. I ended the new window using the End Task feature in Task Manager and have not opened Firefox back up in hope of being able to recover the now 2 (or I guess 3 if the restore re-load is considered a new session) sessions ago windows/tabs. I have tried 2 methods to get my previous tabs back: 1) sessionstore-backups subfolder in the Profiles folder - the recovery.jsonlz4/baklz4 are both from the newer blank tab session, the previous.jsonlz4 is from 2 months ago, and the upgrade.jsonlz4 files are also older from 2 months ago so none of those files have the data I'm looking for 2) ShadowExplorer to find an older version of the sessionstore-backups, but this too did not have helpful files from either the recovery/previous/upgrades file types after extracting and seeing only 3 tabs from the older session they logged Before reopening Firefox again, is there any other method or attempt I should try to restore the now 2 sessions back 3 windows and their tabs? Any relevant help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

All Replies (2)

Josh
Josh Question owner
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Hello, thanks for your response. I do have records in history (thankfully), but only wanted to use that as a last resort given it would take hours to scroll through to find which tabs I had open from the past couple of months and not all of my open tabs would be logged in history as some of them I opened by clicking "open link in new tab" and hadn't loaded those tab pages yet (thus no record in history).

So I do have history for some of the tabs (mixed in with all the other pages in history), but I'm wanting to know how to get specifically the 3 windows and their open tabs back before I re-open Firefox again?

Josh
Josh Question owner
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Thanks for linking to that article, but I had explored that and the .jsonlz4 files in my sessionstore-backups folder were from the newer session and did not contain the tabs I previously had open. Is there anything I can try before reopening Firefox (creating a new session) to weed through my browsing history of the past 3 months? Is there any other method outside of the sessionstore-backups folder that I can try, potentially from another folder or Microsoft file?