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Is there a way to restore previous tabs when you have said no when prompted ?

Firefox Tab basics
cor-el replied
IThelp360
IThelp360

When a window opened up to restore a page(s) it was skipped. I went through all the available information/troubleshooting that i could think of/google/on firefox forums to figure out how to restore those tabs. Firefox was updated to latest version. The correct settings were checked, the restore previous version tab is grayed out. I checked user history and had tabs from 7 days ago, month ago, June, May etc but when clicking on the arrows no information was available. It was like this user never used firefox before. She also does not have a profile or signed in to firefox either. Is there a way that this can be done to get previous sessions back? Is there some sort of backup? Thx

When a window opened up to restore a page(s) it was skipped. I went through all the available information/troubleshooting that i could think of/google/on firefox forums to figure out how to restore those tabs. Firefox was updated to latest version. The correct settings were checked, the restore previous version tab is grayed out. I checked user history and had tabs from 7 days ago, month ago, June, May etc but when clicking on the arrows no information was available. It was like this user never used firefox before. She also does not have a profile or signed in to firefox either. Is there a way that this can be done to get previous sessions back? Is there some sort of backup? Thx

All Replies (2)

Shadow110
Shadow110

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 or not created.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator

You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.

Firefox uses the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file in the profile folder to store session data. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file is only present when Firefox is closed. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file is created from recovery.jsonlz4 when you close Firefox and is removed and copied to previous.jsonlz4 when you start Firefox to make is possible to restore the session at any time.

Backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox Profile Folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data. Do NOT close Firefox when Firefox is already running.

You will normally find these files in the sessionstore-backups folder:

  • previous.jsonlz4 (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 from previous session that was loaded successfully)
  • recovery.jsonlz4 (latest version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • recovery.baklz4 (previous version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)

You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file (make sure to backup the current sessionstore.jsonlz4).

Firefox 56+ releases compress the files in the sessionstore-backups folder and sessionstore.jsonlz4 with LZ4 (.jsonlz4 instead of .js), so it is no longer easy to inspect them.