Crash and no restore option
So had an unusual situation. Mozilla crashed, as in, it shut itself down with some kind of error (did not catch which)
When I started up, no restore option. Okay. Went to history, restore session greyed out, uh oh.....
So I did some googling before shutting down, and I backed up everything in the session-store-backups folder. Turns out this somehow was not enough.
I shut down, and once up I later found this site (would have maybe been more helpful BEFORE shutting down): https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html
This is very handy, I tried every file in there, and no-go, even the bak file.
So for some reason, it gives me a session from eons ago, and not the most recent one when it crashed. This might be because I normally end sessions with tabs still open by closing with it down with task-manager, and maybe the last time I did not do this was eons ago (like 6 weeks?) not sure, but it still seems like it there should have been one recent backup somewhere. I mean each morning I get the session restore prompt, and voila there are all my tabs, so not sure where the heck that file went to when FF crashed itself this time"???/?
Since then I have shut down 3 times, so I imagine I am hooped now?
TIA for any help/insight
All Replies (6)
Cor-el? Anyone?
You may have corrupt sessionstore 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.
Locate the above file. Then rename or delete it. Restart Firefox.
It is a bad idea to force Firefox to close by using the Windows Task Manager. That is the same as a crash and likely doesn't give Firefox the opportunity to create a sessionstore.js file and the state of all database files is uncertain since a lot of data is kept in memory and only stored to disk when you close Firefox properly.
There might still be a recovery.js or recovery.bak file or upgrade.js files in the sessionstore-backups folder, but these are compressed, so it won't be easy to use them (in Firefox 56+ all files in the sessionstore-backups folder are compressed).
Sounds like you have read a lot of past threads. Did you hear about the "Previous Versions" tab? When Windows installs updates, it typically captures a snapshot of your user data in a restore point. I never recommend using system restore, but you can mine the restore point for possibly useful files.
In your sessionstore-backups folder, right-click recovery.js, click Properties,then click the Previous Versions tab. This may take a while to populate. If you see anything promising, you can use the Copy button to save it to a neutral location where Firefox won't clean it up. You also may want to check recovery.bak and previous.js.
And... why do you prefer to crash Firefox instead of exiting normally? I personally switched my startup setting from home page to previous session to avoid accidentally losing my last session when I forgot to restore it. You could consider that: Startup, home page, tabs, and download settings.
(OFF -TOPIC)
cor-el said
There might still be a recovery.js or recovery.bak file or upgrade.js files in the sessionstore-backups folder, but these are compressed, so it won't be easy to use them (in Firefox 56+ all files in the sessionstore-backups folder are compressed).
I added support for .jsonlz4 session files last night. (It only took about 12 hours of beating my head against a wall of nulls before finding a way that worked...)
Thanks all. Nothing corrupt as far as I can tell, though I seem to be getting more crashes lately.
As I said, I was able to use the files in the session-store-backups folder, but the one that was a past version went to a really old session, and not the most recent one, and all the others were not useful either since they also did not go to the most recent session. I think as I alluded too, and Cor-el seems to confirm, there is a black hole here in my history because of how I have been shutting down, which is still odd though why it typically works day in and day out.....?
It just seems that maybe FF crashed too quickly, and in this one case/crash (I have had others that turned out fine) it just did not save the most recent session, I guess. I guess I have accepted I won't ever get those tabs back to peruse.
Thx jscher2000 for that idea, I did try it, and unfortunately the option was greyed out, it said no previous version available, was worth a shot
I guess going forward it does seem safer and makes more sense to just have FF start up opening the previous tabs, I did try this once but elected to revert it, now after this I guess I am going to implement it