Lost tabs after update, previous.jsonlz4 and upgrade.jsonlz4 not found
Earlier today firefox updated (to 60.0 I believe) and there were no issues, all my tabs were safe and I just had to log in again to a few sites, but when I later closed firefox and reopened it a few minutes later I found my last sessions tabs were gone even though I've always had them saved between session (I even checked options and it was still enabled). The 'restore last session' tab is unavaible since there was no crash of any kind and 'closed tabs' was clean too. I've now spent a few hours looking through the forum for fixes and tried just about everything. As many posts direct you to, I've checked the 'sessionstore-backups' folder in my profile folder to get the .json files, however there's ONLY the recovery.baklz4 and recovery.jsonlz4 files present, even with hidden files and folders turned on. So i'm missing the previous.js and upgrade.js. I found one other user (post here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1214114) who had this issue as well and found the missing files with ShadowExplorer, but in my case the old sessionstore folder found through ShadowExplorer still had only the very recent recovery.bak and recovery.json. I also tried the other program linked in the thread, but it requires system restore points, which I don't have enabled. I even checked all the .bak and .json files I could find with https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html for htmls, but there's only the tabs from the session after I lost all the old ones. My old session probably had 200+ tabs from from the past few months, some were a bit important or job-hunting related (the most relevant ones were bookmarked, luckily).
All Replies (8)
maybe the tabs are still present in your sessionstore.js
Check hamburger-menu -> library -> history -> previously closed windows (or maybe tabs, if windows doesn't contain, the window with the tabs you are missing)
You can check if you have an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop in case the Refresh feature in Firefox has been used and a new profile has been created.
Djfe said
maybe the tabs are still present in your sessionstore.js Check hamburger-menu -> library -> history -> previously closed windows (or maybe tabs, if windows doesn't contain, the window with the tabs you are missing)
This was the firs thing I tried and no, it was all clean. The standard recovery options can't do anything in this case.
cor-el said
You can check if you have an "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop in case the Refresh feature in Firefox has been used and a new profile has been created.
There's no such folder on the desktop, in the firefox folder or anywhere else on my computer from what I can see.
how large is your sessionstore.js?
Djfe said
how large is your sessionstore.js?
At this point I've already restarted firefox once so it's been converted to previoius.js and the url's in it weren't helpful.
I don't think we can help you then sadly :( And reproducing the issue is likely out of the scope of what's possible.
When I had lost some tabs today (empty tabs, no url but correct tab icon), I was able to restore them using one of the compressed upgrade.json files to revert to a previous state. https://i.imgur.com/wp1KAcu.png
I'm using the nightly though.
The last resort, I could think of: Windows Recovery Is there a previous version of the folder available?
Regards
You can try this utility to browse System Restore points to see if you can find previous version of sessionstore files.
- System Restore Explorer: http://nicbedford.co.uk/software/systemrestoreexplorer/
Thanks for the last two tips, but as I said in the opening post I don't have system restore points on this pc. I haven't used the feature before since I use an external drive for normal backups and this is the first time in my life it would have been handy.