Hi Blue, there are two kinds of files you can save from the Scrounger: an HTML-format list, and a decompressed version of the original file in JSON format. Firefox can read the JSON file, but if the Scrounger can read the original file, Firefox also should be able to read the original file. I think what you need is this procedure:

Session Restore - Manual Swap

There are several steps:

(1) From inside Firefox (the profile where you want to restore an older session), open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either

• "3-bar" menu button > Help > More Troubleshooting Information
• (menu bar) Help > More Troubleshooting Information
• type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the first table on the page, find the Profile Folder row. On that row, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a Windows File Explorer window listing the various files and folders in your profile.

(2) Leaving that window open, switch back to Firefox and Exit, either:

• "3-bar" menu button > Exit
• (menu bar) File > Exit

Pause while Firefox finishes its cleanup -- a file named sessionstore.jsonlz4 should appear in the folder. (If it never appears, don't be alarmed.)

(3) Once Firefox has stopped updating things, while viewing the main level of the profile folder, rename one folder and two files:

(i) right-click the sessionstore-backups folder > Rename to sessionstore-backupsOLD

(ii) right-click the sessionCheckpoints.json file > Rename to sessionCheckpointsOLD.json (if you see a sessionCheckpoints.json.tmp file, right-click > Delete it)

(iii) right-click the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file > Rename to sessionstoreOLD.jsonlz4 (if you see a sessionstore.js or sessionstore.bak file, right-click > Delete it)

(4) Copy in the other file you want to restore, and rename it with the name appropriate for its format:

• Compressed file such as previous.jsonlz4 => sessionstore.jsonlz4
• Uncompressed file such as previous.js => sessionstore.js

(5) Start Firefox and it should read the swapped in sessionstore file and restore whatever was in the substitute file; if you do not have Firefox set to restore your previous windows and tabs automatically, use History > Restore Previous Session

Any luck?

Hi thanks jscher2000. I put a screenshot of the files in the folder, I just renamed it. I didn't see any sessionCheckpoints.json or sessionstore.jsonlz4 files in the folder. I turned off the restore previous windows and tab setting afterwards though. Are there any limitations with file size? When I converted the file using the scrounger my file was around 44mb. I do plan on reducing my tabs but I get rid of them as I get done with them so I'll be needing most if not all of them back so cleaning up will be easier. Opening them one at a time is an inconvenience I'd rather avoid. Thanks a lot for helping me address my issues.

Hi Blue, the sessionCheckpoints.json file and the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file -- if any exist -- would be in profile folder, not in the sessionstore-backups sub-folder. That would be "up" one level from the folder in your screenshot.

Regarding size, some users have scary large session history files and they seem to work fine until they stop working. I normally have 15-20 windows and 80-120 tabs open, so my compressed .jsonlz4 files rarely exceed 2 MB (or 2,048 KB as Windows sees it), and more often are half that size, maybe because I haven't visited a lot of these tabs recently so only minimal info is stored for those tabs. It's a bit of mystery to me what all accumulates in there...

Oh good to know. I found the sessioncheckpoints.json but not the other. The only other file that has session in them in the profile folder are session-state.json What should I do next?

Hmm, I'm not sure where you are in the steps.

If you are finished with #2 and #3, then:

What is the old file that you want Firefox to use?

Let's say it's previous.jsonlz4. You would paste that into the profile folder (main level, not in the sub-folder) and right-click > Rename it to sessionstore.jsonlz4.

On the other hand, if you want to use a JSON file saved from the Scrounger, you need to rename it to sessionstore.js (not .json, for historical reasons).

I finished everything up to step 4 and 5 of your first post but it just reloaded my current tabs again.. I'll try it again with a fresh file and see if anything happens. The old file that I changed is a previous.jsonlz4 file. It is something that I saved from scrounger so I tried using .js but it didn't work unfortunately.

Why not just use the previous.jsonlz4 without decompressing it first?

Okay tried it, still the same. Should I be deleting any of the other files? These are the names of the files in my backups. I just tried putting the previous.jsonlz4 in session store backups. Apologies for all the hassle.

Okay, to recap:

You loaded previous.jsonlz4 from your backup into the Scrounger.

The file decompressed successfully, enabling the buttons.

You clicked "Scrounge URLs" to extract the tabs list and confirm that this file has the missing tabs. Judging from the size, it probably does.

If it is the file you want to use, do the substitution as described in the earlier steps. There is no point at which you would put a file into the renamed sessionstore-backupsOLD folder. There should not be a sessionstore-backups folder (if one was created during a restore attempt, delete it).

I'll try again later. I must be doing something wrong, thanks a lot for offering all those solutions though. At least I still have access to the links from the tab list so they're not totally lost though. I appreciate the help and the time that you gave.