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"Restore tabs and windows" malfunction

RoryMercury
RoryMercury
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"Restore tabs and windows" page turned up empty despite me having multiple of both open. I can't get them back through this feature or through my history recently closed tabs or windows options. Unfortunate glitch. And because some of the tabs/windows were saved/last opened days ago I would have to hunt through several days, even a week or two's worth of history to find everything again.

Just wanted someone to be aware of this glitch so that hopefully it doesn't happen again.

"Restore tabs and windows" page turned up empty despite me having multiple of both open. I can't get them back through this feature or through my history recently closed tabs or windows options. Unfortunate glitch. And because some of the tabs/windows were saved/last opened days ago I would have to hunt through several days, even a week or two's worth of history to find everything again. Just wanted someone to be aware of this glitch so that hopefully it doesn't happen again.

All Replies (1)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Hi RoryMercury, sorry to hear about the inconvenience. Firefox generally stores one previous session, and sometimes Firefox may be opened and closed unexpectedly causing that session to be replaced by a useless one.

One workaround is to set Firefox to ALWAYS start up with your previous session tabs and windows. This is set on the Options page, General panel, under "When Firefox starts".

Of course, there are also times that a file becomes corrupted or gets deleted, which is hard to work around.

You might be able to find older tabs in a backup made by Firefox at your last update. To check on that:

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 "Open Folder" button.

Double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. Save all files here to a safe location.

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

  • recovery.jsonlz4: the windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session (or, if Firefox crashed at the last shutdown and is still closed, your last session)
  • recovery.baklz4: a backup copy of recovery.jsonlz4
  • previous.jsonlz4: the windows and tabs in your last Firefox session
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-build_id: the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update

Do any seem to be from the right date/time to have some or all of your missing tabs?

To preview the contents of a file, you can drag and drop it onto this page, then click Scrounge URLs: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html

You also can save the page of clickable links as a backup. (That tool is on my site, so please let me know if it doesn't work for you.)