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About 620 tabs now rendered useless; all appear as 'New Tab' when I start Firefox.

  • 25 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by AnthoTira7

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I had so many tabs open at one point (I was in the process of getting rid of them, one by one...if you've used Tumblr, you know what I mean) and Firefox crashed. When I clicked the 'Crash Report' thing and Firefox restarted, all my previous tabs now appeared as a New Tab. This happened about 2 or 3 weeks ago...I've done dozens of crash report restarts, as, one time, it actually did restore all my tabs and I got through a number of them before it crashed again and they all went back to New Tabs. How do I recover all those all tabs? Any help? I really, really need those tabs back.

I had so many tabs open at one point (I was in the process of getting rid of them, one by one...if you've used Tumblr, you know what I mean) and Firefox crashed. When I clicked the 'Crash Report' thing and Firefox restarted, all my previous tabs now appeared as a New Tab. This happened about 2 or 3 weeks ago...I've done dozens of crash report restarts, as, one time, it actually did restore all my tabs and I got through a number of them before it crashed again and they all went back to New Tabs. How do I recover all those all tabs? Any help? I really, really need those tabs back.

All Replies (5)

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I will do so; thank you. Hope you have even the slightest bit of success, being as you are far more versed in this than I. Will send right away.

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If the most recent sessionstore.bak, sessionstore.js, and sessionstore.bak-datetime do not have the "real" URLs, you could check whether Windows captured an earlier version of the file in a Restore Point (for example, on "patch Tuesday" when the September updates for Windows usually are released).

The easiest way to check is to right-click the sessionstore.js file > Properties > Previous Versions. If you find relevant-looking versions, try to restore them to a different folder. If you have to restore them to the "live" profile folder, make sure Firefox is not running to avoid corrupting the files.

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Nothing I've right-clicked on seems to have the "Restore Previous Version" feature in Properties. I know it's something I've seen many times, so I know where to look, but, as this is a relatively newly purchased laptop, not sure why it isn't there, and why it doesn't seem to come up for anything I right-click. However, I do see where that line of thinking is going and it seems like that would be the trick, if I could only find a way to access those previous versions, assuming they're still somewhere on here.

And yes, the file(s) attached, as it turns out, were mainly just containing several repetitions of essentially the same links. Found it out the hard way a little while ago by scrolling down and copying several links and such. It seems it was all kind of a snowball, the way this happened. I had many, many tabs backed up. Over 600 or so...maybe closer to 700 or so. There was a Firefox update that seems to have wiped out certain data for a number of people. Either I pressed Enter on accident when an update confirmation pop-up came onscreen or the browser just automatically updated and restarted, and there all the info of those tabs just sort of vanished into thin air. I don't know if that's what's considered 'corrupted', but that's the story. Even anytime it crashed before the update, all the tabs still came back. After the one specific late August, Early September-update is when all hell broke loose with tabs.

If I can track down any previous versions and find success, I'll let you know...otherwise, thank you very much for trying your best to aid me with this situation. Probably mainly my fault for taking so long to come here. Might've had plenty of salvageable tabs weeks ago. Many thanks for all your time and efforts. :)

Modified by AnthoTira7

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I'm sorry, I thought you had Windows 7. Windows 8.1 hid this tab.

I read about a roundabout way to get Previous Versions on the Properties dialog in Windows 8. I can't test this myself, but here's what you do:

In the address bar of your Windows Explorer dialog, replace the current path with the following and press Enter:

\\localhost\c$

Then click at the end and tack on the following (with your username) and press Enter:

\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

That should get you in the vicinity of your profile folder.

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The method works. However, nothing comes up in the Previous Versions section, so I would suppose that settles it...there's no saving all those tabs.

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