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brave
Previous session lost (open tabs) - how to restore?
Description
Last session (open tabs) was lost after a regular reboot; unable to restore that session
Steps to Reproduce
Can not reproduce at this point
Brave version (brave://version info)
Version 0.63.55 Chromium: 74.0.3729.131 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Version/Channel Information:
current release
I'm sure this is a known issue but I wasn't able to figure out how to fix this myself.
I'm aware that there are session files stored both in the main directory, as well as the session storage folder (AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data), however I'm not sure what to do with those files.
Firefox allows to rename those backup files and replace them with the flawed session, but this doesn't seem to work in this case (respectively not sure what I'm doing wrong).
I have old session files (.ldb) from last night that should contain my open tabs (afaik) but what do I do with them?
The sync function doesn't help because the other device was also updated to a brandnew session :(
Using the browser history is one way to "fix" this (quite tedious task tbh); copy/pasting a single file might be a bit more easier.
Despite not being able to restore my previous session, I decided to make a copy of the entire folder.
Today, I had the exact same issue: I started Brave, the browser insta crashes. When I opened it again, all my tabs were gone.
So I copied the folder from last week (the "backup") into the main directory and replaced all new files with the old ones. However, something seems to auto-update or auto-overwrite the old files and replace them with the corrupted "last session" or "last tabs" files.
How do I make a proper backup? What folders/files are relevant to restore the last browser session (all open tabs, etc)?
I've been comparing snapshots of the directory and trying to figure out what is what - two hours wasted so far.
It would be really nice to get some insight here.
@silent5am
A few questions: Are you losing your cookies as well? When you run into this issue, can you restore your tabs under history where it says recently closed? Did the restore tabs popup show up also in the upper right hand corner when you opened the browser again?
Did you remove any fonts at any point since the last time it loaded correctly before each crash (and do you have the setting for On Startup: Continue where you left off)?
Hi, I've had this happen to me twice now. I do have "Continue where you left off" set and no, cookies are not lost, neither is history. In fact, the browser remembers I had two windows with different profiles open; it's just that the tabs for each window are gone.
This is honestly extremely awful for my workflow and if it happens again I'll just have to switch to another Chromium fork since it's too unreliable as a daily driver for work.
This happen to me often on two computers too (Win10 both). Nothing in the window history remain so I can't restore a session, only the browser history.
@mixedCase & @Nerothos when this usually happens, are you guys a few versions behind when upgrading or always on the current one? We've had a few reports in the past where users who miss a few releases and update sometimes run into this issue as well. Just curious if this could be the same situation or something else.
@kjozwiak I'm going to test that later, but last time it happened it wasn't the case. I maintain one of the Brave packaging scripts for Arch Linux and tend to update to stable releases the same day they are marked as such.
As a point probably worth noting, I believe last time it happened it was either first or second execution of the browser after updating, so if there's logic running to migrate the configuration schema and there was a schema change with last version it is worth investigating there.
Regardless, updating through arbitrary versions without losing state should be possible within reason. I'm sure the Chromium team has a very generous period before they break things.
My previous comment may be invalid. I got the crash again without changing any fonts, but after removing nautilus, if that matters. I am still using The Great Suspender, but have been for many months and only ever got the instant disappearing silent crash and loss of tabs twice so far.
@poikilos mind going into brave://crashes, submitting the crash reports and reporting the Crash Report ID? Example of a submitted crash report:
You should be seeing a Send now link at the bottom of each crash, example:
Maybe you can enable Automatically send crash reports to Brave via chrome://settings/privacy?
@kjozwiak Like before, crash reporting is disabled, and there are 0 crashes. Again, I wish I could enable reports but disable sending them automatically. I enabled them for now so I'll let you know if I get anything.
I'm not sure they are all relevant but here : crashid.txt
Thanks 👍 @simonhong mind taking a look at some of these to see if these are similar to the other reports?
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebe48dc33001f8dccde
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebec43734001f555709
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebdc43734001f555706
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebd48dc33001f8dccd1
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebc0e0705001f618af0
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebc0e0705001f618aed
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebbc43734001f5556e9
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebbc43734001f5556e3
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359eba48dc33001f8dccb3
- https://stats.brave.com/dashboard#crash/5d359ebac43734001f5556db
I have lost all my tabs in a similar way on at least 2 occasions. I'm running under Windows 10. While the issue is ongoing, is there a way we can back up our session? It was apparently possible under previous versions (see https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/13483), but when I try to do so with version 0.69.135 some presumably critical files like 'Current Session' and 'Current Tabs' under 'C:\Users\userid\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default' are inaccessble while the browser is open.
If you are using Chrome you can restore your tabs following these steps https://rocketfiles.com/articles/how-to-restore-tabs-on-chrome.
@Voronovskiy, The problem is that restoring does not work after some type(s) of crash(es). The second "solution" at the link proposes looking in history for all of your tabs, which is not a solution. Some of my tabs could be for a project I started a month ago or more. Regardless, I open tabs over the course of several days. The only people who care about this issue are people who use tabs heavily. We need to enable crash reports, which is not on by default, then somehow hope to lose our data so we at least have a matching crash report number.
Any one doing important work and spend quite a bit of effort right-clicking with dozens of tabs open on the bar. I recommend this extension called SessionBuddy, it helps in these circumstances where crashes often occur and the browser is useless in retrieving/restoring.
I had to force-reboot my laptop today and was looking to restore all my tabs on Brave. Brave prompted me with a "restore" button, but this opened up a ton of really old(closed) tabs from two weeks ago. Also, going to "History" to reopen a group of tabs messes things up(sometimes opens the same bunch of tabs in different windows). I'm wondering if there is an easier way to manage crash restore.
This is a dealkiller. I've been very happy with Brave for a few weeks but my laptop just crashed, and when I reopened Brave it offered to restore my tabs, but then did nothing when I told it to. Some of the tabs were very old, there is no way for me to manually fish them out of my history among all the other historical pages I viewed and wanted closed.
I do have "continue where you left off" selected and am upgraded to the latest version.
This is a very nasty surprise and has destroyed weeks' worth of productivity. This bug is not something I can live with. This problem renders Brave not ready for use as a browser in real-world environments.
I second the above persons comment. Even more disappointing when you're simultaneously running normal tabs and private tabs.
Please don't go back to your muon-laptop ways. I remember the same exact thing happening and the terrible thing was similar to the above user I was using it as my primary browser to bug report issues pertaining to this and nobody did anything.
If the team is going to work holistically on Rewards then please tell us that this is primarily a Crypto based browser and that you'd be working on other user preferred issues along the way as opposed to focusing on them right away.
@SeAlgoAsoma definitely sorry you experienced that ☹️ Would you be able to visit brave://crashes/ and see if if the crash is recorded there? You may need to click a "send" or "submit" button, give it a few seconds, and then restart the browser. When it sends the report, it'll share a "Report ID" which you can share here which I can use to find the root cause. What OS are you on?
There are no known-to-us ways to cause this kind of loss to happen. I've tried to reproduce these kind of crashes and the data is always there. We definitely DO want to solve this problem as we strongly agree that losing anything is a bad experience ☹️
If anyone here experiences this, please help us with crash reports. Also, knowing the VERSION and OS that you're on is super helpful. Also helpful: if you have Rewards enabled. Windows users might be able to additionally use eventvwr to see if any records were written to Event Viewer around the time of the crash
@NumDeP Muon had a number of issues with session integrity which is one of the reasons we abandoned it in favor of brave-core. As shared above, I haven't been able to reproduce this. I have troubleshooted similar issues where sqlite DBs were corrupted and there was dataloss.
In your profile directory (ex: ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default on macOS) there are two files of interest:
Current SessionCurrent Tabs
It's likely one or both of these was corrupted, perhaps by crashing while a write was happening. It's definitely worth a shot trying to get the tabs back with Ctrl + Shift + T (or Cmd + Shift + T)
I highly recommend installing this great little extension called Session Buddy: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/session%20buddy it saved my back with Chrome soooo many times. Should work with Brave equally well. It is the most annoying thing in the world that this is still happening!
Yep just happened to me... again. I just can't keep using Brave. No sync and it loses all my tabs is just too much to deal with in a modern browser. I really want to love Brave but with (IMO) basic/core functionality of the browser being broken it just isn't usable day-to-day no matter how much I like the other features.
Yep just happened to me... again. I just can't keep using Brave. No sync and it loses all my tabs is just too much to deal with in a modern browser. I really want to love Brave but with (IMO) basic/core functionality of the browser being broken it just isn't usable day-to-day no matter how much I like the other features.
seriously - install the above plugin - works very well for me on Brave/Chrome. basically solves the problem, its a shame they can't fix the browser instead, but its been a Chrome problem for years... however with this little plugin - sorted!
I'm using Firefox for now. Container tabs are really a killer feature in FF not available elsewhere -- I love being able to log into "privacy dangerous" sites like Facebook in a tab I know is cookie/data isolated from all other browsing. Tree style tab is also a killer addon for FF not available for chrome.
It would be awesome if BAT/Brave Rewards could be usable in other browsers via an extension rather than baked into Brave.