Firefox not restoring previous session after a Windows 10 crash
I had a Windows 10 crash. When I relaunched Firefox, it updated me with old tabs. When I checked sesionstore-backups, I found that my previous.js and recovery.js date back to 2017. Nothing I do seems to lead to their being updated.
Oddly enough, the tabs restored were not from 2017 but from earlier this month, probably when I last rebooted my PC. Two files in the profile have been updated:
upgrade.jsonlz4-20200403064753 on 4/7/2020 recovery.baklz4 in real time.
So, my two questions are: 1) Going forward, can I rename recovery.bklz4 to previous.jsnolz4 and use that to restore my previous session? 2) is there any way within Firefox to manually force it to update previous.jsnolz4
All Replies (2)
Sorry to hear about the crash. Firefox will look for files in approximately this order:
- sessionstore.jsonlz4 at the main level of the profile folder; only present after a normal shutdown
- recovery.jsonlz4 in the sessionstore-backups folder
- recovery.baklz4 in the sessionstore-backups folder
- previous.jsonlz4 in the sessionstore-backups folder
- upgrade... files in the sessionstore-backups folder
(Firefox probably will never get down to the old .js files unless all the others are missing.)
So with that in mind:
abossy said
1) Going forward, can I rename recovery.bklz4 to previous.jsnolz4 and use that to restore my previous session?
With the above sequence in mind, it would be better to carefully back it up, then rename it to recovery.jsonlz4 or sessionstore.jsonlz4 and place it in the appropriate location for that file.
2) is there any way within Firefox to manually force it to update previous.jsnolz4
The previous.jsonlz4 file usually gets updated automatically when you exit and start Firefox again. Its contents will mirror sessionstore.jsonlz4 or whatever file is found at startup.
By the way, I have a tool to extract the contents of your session history file and generate a page of links. You can use this to preview which files contain what, and/or to back up the file contents in a more usable format.