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Lost tabs that i had open, laptop crashed.. Cannot find the tabs anywere. Please help!!

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Hi there,

I had a number of tabs, maybe 40-50 open on my Mozilla browser and then a combination of the computer crashing and the update meant that the next time i restarted firefox, it didnt give me the option to restore my previous session. I have done updates before/laptop has crashed before and it has been fine.

Ive gone to the History tab.. And there is nothing.. Only has a history of what i have done today.

I have looked on your troubleshooting page, gone to the folder which has sessionbackup but there is nothing there (apart from what it has saved today)

I dont understand how this can be. Please, please help me. Would you be able to advise me on where to look or how to restore the tabs? Is there somewhere that i can go in windows maybe? Please, there are some articles, websites, that are incredibly important to me and I really like to restore them if at all possible.

If there is any way in which you can help/advise: I would be most grateful.

Hi there, I had a number of tabs, maybe 40-50 open on my Mozilla browser and then a combination of the computer crashing and the update meant that the next time i restarted firefox, it didnt give me the option to restore my previous session. I have done updates before/laptop has crashed before and it has been fine. Ive gone to the History tab.. And there is nothing.. Only has a history of what i have done today. I have looked on your troubleshooting page, gone to the folder which has sessionbackup but there is nothing there (apart from what it has saved today) I dont understand how this can be. Please, please help me. Would you be able to advise me on where to look or how to restore the tabs? Is there somewhere that i can go in windows maybe? Please, there are some articles, websites, that are incredibly important to me and I really like to restore them if at all possible. If there is any way in which you can help/advise: I would be most grateful.

All Replies (2)

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How can you do this:

  1. Click on the Menu History and select "Recent Tabs".
  2. Select the tab title that you wish to restore.

If you are already in the new session:

  1. Select the tab that you lost If you are in a new session: History > Restore Previous Session

If you would like to change the settings follow these instructions:

Now I'd start copying $profile/sessionstore-backups/FILE to $profile/sessionstore.js in the following order where FILE=...

1) recovery.js 2) recovery.bak 3) upgrade.js-XXX

One of those should work and have at least most of the lost data. After copying you can start Firefox and see if that worked. If it didn't then quit Firefox and try the next FILE.

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Sorry for the delayed help. If you check your desktop, do you have an Old Firefox Data folder? If so, if you look inside, is there a semi-randomly-named folder that seems to have been updated recently, or around the time of the update? If so, hang onto that for possible use in a later reply.


In case the reference to $profile in the earlier reply is mysterious to you, here's how to find the key folder:

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 "Show Folder" button.

In the window that launches, scroll down and double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. Save all files here to a safe location, such as your Documents folder. Then you can try the recovery method suggested in the first reply.