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Firefox only restored about half of my restored session

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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I had 3 windows with lots of tabs open and firefox only restored half of them. It's taking me a lot of time to go through history and finding the ones I lost and restoring them. I closed all firefox windows on exiting, verifying for each one to close the tabs, and yet this still happened when I restarted. I noticed afterwards that under options, under general, restore session was unclicked?? I have no recollection of doing that or any reason I would. I also saw that the sub box to warn me when closing tabs was also unclicked. Again, I would never unclick it and have no recollection or reason to have been fiddling with all that.

The only other thing is when first rebooting as I was going to history to restore sessions a Norton tab (I have Norton 360) popped up. I restored history and half of my stuff was gone. Does anyone have any idea of what's going on here?

I had 3 windows with lots of tabs open and firefox only restored half of them. It's taking me a lot of time to go through history and finding the ones I lost and restoring them. I closed all firefox windows on exiting, verifying for each one to close the tabs, and yet this still happened when I restarted. I noticed afterwards that under options, under general, restore session was unclicked?? I have no recollection of doing that or any reason I would. I also saw that the sub box to warn me when closing tabs was also unclicked. Again, I would never unclick it and have no recollection or reason to have been fiddling with all that. The only other thing is when first rebooting as I was going to history to restore sessions a Norton tab (I have Norton 360) popped up. I restored history and half of my stuff was gone. Does anyone have any idea of what's going on here?

All Replies (3)

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Correction, I had 6 windows open to start.

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You may have corrupt sessionstore [v56] sessionstore.jsonlz4 file(s). Delete all sessionstore* files and the sessionstore-backups folder.

Type about:support<enter> in the address bar.

Under the page logo on the left side, you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Folder. To its right press the button Show Folder. This will open your file browser to the current Firefox profile. Now Close Firefox.

Windows: Show Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder

Linux: Under the page logo on the left side, you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Directory. To its right press the button Open Directory.

Locate the above file. Then rename or delete it. Restart Firefox.


Don't delete the files if you need to rescue any data from them, just move them out of the profile folder to some location where Firefox doesn't look for them. You can try to read out their contents using this tool: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html

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Make sure to use one of these to close Firefox if you are currently doing that by clicking the close X on the Firefox Title bar, especially if you want to be able to restore all windows on the next start (you can only undo three windows via Recently Closed Windows).

  • "3-bar" menu button -> Exit (Power button)
  • Windows: File -> Exit
  • Mac: Firefox -> Quit Firefox
  • Linux: File -> Quit