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I accidentally deleted all my tabs on my mackbook pro and was wondering if there was a way to recover them from time machine backups. I'm running quantum 58

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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First of all, I love the speed of Firefox quantum! Anyway, as I said I lost my tabs. I had this crazy pop up saying it was going to delete them and I chose forget and it did it any way. I use time machine and have backups for over a year. Is there a way to go back several days, when I had all my tabs and restore them? I'm running Mac os High Sierra 10.13.3 and Firefox quantum 58.0.2 (64 bit version).

First of all, I love the speed of Firefox quantum! Anyway, as I said I lost my tabs. I had this crazy pop up saying it was going to delete them and I chose forget and it did it any way. I use time machine and have backups for over a year. Is there a way to go back several days, when I had all my tabs and restore them? I'm running Mac os High Sierra 10.13.3 and Firefox quantum 58.0.2 (64 bit version).

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This did absolutely nothing. But thanks for trying.

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Can you remember what pop-up this was about?

You need to restore sessionstore.jsonlz4 from a Time Machine backup to restore tabs from that specific session

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.

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.

See also: