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restore previous session grayed out and I cant find the backups

  • 25 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 16 views
  • Last reply by TBUsseer

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Power went out and now FF has none of my tabs from previous session. I'm not positive and maybe someone was trying to help in my absence but I don't think I restarted FF twice without saving a backup copy of the .js lot. The last time I went through this was in Dec. 2016. I don't want to have to go there to restore. HELP

Power went out and now FF has none of my tabs from previous session. I'm not positive and maybe someone was trying to help in my absence but I don't think I restarted FF twice without saving a backup copy of the .js lot. The last time I went through this was in Dec. 2016. I don't want to have to go there to restore. HELP

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jscher2000, I just realized that we are not on the same page. If Spinrite doesn't work and I can figure out how to get another browser on my XP machine without interfering with the current broken FF I will be running Scrounger on the .js files. What I'm thinking of is a search of my history file. Where previous.js is a snapshot of "history" taken when I shut down, the history I'm referring to is the one from the menu. It knows the day I opened the tab and keeps that record but does it know when I closed it. If so can I read the meta data and find the shutdown date? Any tab without a shutdown date is still opened.

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History is a record of URLs and visit times. That is stored in the places.sqlite database. History does not store information about what is currently open or recently closed.

Session History is a set of open and recently closed windows and tabs. There is data in a session history file for the time a tab was closed, but it's a long number that needs to be converted to be understandable:

"_closedTabs": [{
 "state": {
  "entries": [{
   "url": "https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1176749#answer-1009859",
   "title": "How to get Firefox to autofill passwords? | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support",
   "charset": "UTF-8",
   "ID": 553,
   "docshellUUID": "{fe8cc5d7-61f7-42bc-8819-58db0fdac058}",
   "originalURI": "https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1176749#answer-1009859",
   "principalToInherit_base64": "...",
   "triggeringPrincipal_base64": "...",
   "docIdentifier": 558,
   "persist": true
  }],
  "lastAccessed": 1506353391466,
  "hidden": false,
  "attributes": {},
  "userContextId": 0,
  "index": 1,
  "scroll": {
   "scroll": "0,4399"
  },
  "image": "https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/static/sumo/img/firefox-16.png?v=1",
  "iconLoadingPrincipal": "..."
 },
 "title": "How to get Firefox to autofill passwords? | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support",
 "image": "https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/static/sumo/img/firefox-16.png?v=1",
 "iconLoadingPrincipal": "...",
 "pos": 7,
 "closedAt": 1506353391468,
 "closedId": 63
},
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Jscher2000, I gave up and decided to load a file I created in history ( 148 tabs ). It should not have taken more than 10 minutes. It's been 10 hours or more. I'm afraid to shut FF off. Who knows what will happen. The file had the latest complete set of tabs. I used 'bookmark all tabs' to get them. Even if I close FF and try again I expect to have the same problem. Any ideas? Thanks Dave

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Hi Dave, do you mean you used the "Open All in Tabs" feature to open an entire folder of 148 bookmarks all at once? I do not have a sense of how long that should take, but 10 hours seems too long. Firefox should have loaded them, or crashed, or gone nonresponsive by now. I suppose it's possible that on some of the tabs you can't see there was a message that requires you to OK/Cancel or something like that which is holding things up. But if Firefox is frozen, then this approach isn't going to work.

Anyway, crashing Firefox using the Task Manager usually doesn't corrupt your bookmarks. No guarantees, unfortunately.

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Jscher2000, FF has gone non responsive and recovered several times. I will write as to just what is going on but I'm falling asleep as I write. I am getting a slow response every time I shift programs, say, to Freecell and back. I'll get into the details on Sunday. Thanks again David

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