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FIREFOX ATE MY SESSION

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Firefox was closed. I go to Start -> Mozilla Firefox -> Start Privat Browsing (THE CURRENT SESSION WILL BE SAVED). FF ATE MY PREVIOUS SESSION AFTER THAT! I HATE GUY WHO MADE FF LIKE THIS!!! I LOST ALL MY TABS AND TAB GROUPS AND ALL!!

I WANT MY TABS BACK! I WANT MY SESSION BACK!!

i won't go anywhere without them!!! in what file my previous session is saved?

[Profanity removed by moderator. Please read Mozilla Support rules and guidelines, thanks.]

Firefox was closed. I go to Start -> Mozilla Firefox -> Start Privat Browsing (THE CURRENT SESSION WILL BE SAVED). FF ATE MY PREVIOUS SESSION AFTER THAT! I HATE GUY WHO MADE FF LIKE THIS!!! I LOST ALL MY TABS AND TAB GROUPS AND ALL!! I WANT MY TABS BACK! I WANT MY SESSION BACK!! i won't go anywhere without them!!! in what file my previous session is saved? ''[Profanity removed by moderator. Please read [[Forum and chat rules and guidelines]], thanks.]''

Modified by Chris Ilias

All Replies (5)

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Go to the Windows Start menu, search box, paste the following and press Enter:


%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles

You may have one folder there, or multiple folders. Look for the most recent one and open it. Then look for files starting with sessionstore and copy and paste those to a safe location such as the desktop. Do this as soon as possible in case you need to recover data from the files.

Now... hopefully someone will be able to help extract the data from there. I've read discussion about it before, but haven't tried it myself. Example threads about sessionstore surgery:

After upgrade, Firefox has lost my tabs. When I restore sessionstore.js, Friefox ignores or overwrites it. How can I get it to load my tabs from the backup files?

Restoring session from sessionstore.bak file

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They both contains same crap opened in my tabs now. Where the hell did it do with my tabs, i ask you?! What shall i do now??! Damn it!

Modified by Reiser

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I think your best tool at this point is history. All of the URLs you opened in those tabs during your last non-Private session would be in your history for that date. You can display your full history using Ctrl+Shift+h and you can open relevant URLs in a new tab using right-click > Open in a new tab.

Obviously that's extremely inconvenient, and I can't explain what happened when you exited Private Browsing.

For future reference, if some set of tabs is essential to your life, you could consider using another feature, which is to bookmark all open tabs. This saves just the URL, not the tab's full history, but it could be useful nonetheless. Right-click any tab and choose Bookmark All Tabs. Note: by "all" it means "in this window".

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«I can't explain what happened when you exited Private Browsing.»

There was crucial I opened FF from Start menu by 'start private mode' while it was closed. I've encountered this problem in FF 4 or 5, when 'private browsing' was first presented; i hoped it was fixed, in vain... I'm in sorrow.

There was tab groups i've not switched for month, sorted for special purposes. It's months of history to run over. Damn it twice! What a worthless bug...

Modified by Reiser

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Really sorry to hear about that. I don't have that option on my Start menu for some reason, and I will avoid it if I find it.

If you don't run backup software regularly, you might want to create a Scheduled Task in Windows to copy your sessionstore.js file to a safe location every night. You can do this with a batch file (.bat) or VBScript file (.vbs) or using PowerShell (a newer batch language I haven't started using).