How can I restore a lost Chrome session?

Computer shut down on me and the restore previous session button didn't work. Is there a file that shows previous session URLs? I remember hearing about this a while ago. Any help is appreciated thanks

Solution 1:

As I just had this happen to me let me describe the scenario and why CTRL-SHIFT-T doesn't work for me:

1. a new driver crashed my PC so I had to restart
2. while I waited for all the system tray icons (Dropbox, etc.) to start I noticed the Intel Driver Updater and clicked it
3. this opened up an EMPTY Chrome. There was a message box "Restore windows after crash" but it either didn't work or disappeared while the cookie notice from the Intel website popped up
4. I was left with an empty Chrome window

Now since I use multiple windows to separate different work projects the history or recent tab doesn't help. Some of the tabs were opened more than a week ago and I'll never find them in the history.

I installed the Chrome extension Session Buddy and with one click I could restore a backup from 10 minutes ago.

Now don't laugh at me: I had 32 windows with 122 tabs open and re-opening them worked just fine

Solution 2:

Update 9/5/2021: This answer and the script have been updated. Now it works again with the new Chrome "Session_" "Tabs_" files

If you go into your Chrome directory, it should be %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Sessions if you're using the "Default" Chrome session, you should see the files Session_* and Tabs_*, which are files for your Session. There should be files for both your Current and your Previous sessions.

Copy these files into another folder to backup them before you restart the browser so they don't get accidentally replaced with an empty new session

If you kill your browser, then relaunch, it should ask you if you want to restore your session again, and it will pick the newest "Session_" and "Tabs_" files from that folder. So you should be able to remove the newest ones from there and leave the older ones, and then it should open the previous session when you restore.

For this, you need to Kill the browser, not just close it, because otherwise, it won't trigger the "Restore session" prompt.

To kill it you can enter chrome://inducebrowsercrashforrealz in the URL bar, or use Task Manager, or the command line.

I've also automated this process and I have some simple bat scripts that I use to easily copy the current session, restore, and make some backups

You can check them out here

https://github.com/aljgom/chrome_sessions

(this demo video is slightly different than the updated version, but it is pretty much the same)

Solution 3:

I recommend using The Great Suspender. Besides allowing you to keep open tabs "suspended" (so they don't consume memory) it keeps a record of your windows and its respective tabs. My computer just cracked and I was able to recover my 5 windows and +50 tabs thanks to using that.