[Kirrus: Say hello to my brother, Garreth, who wrote this post. He’ll be posting every now and then :))
I am in the habit of keeping a million tabs open and having Firefox automatically restore them when I reopen
([main]\{startup}\when Firefox starts – show my windows and tabs from last time).
Unfortunately this time I left open a popup window and clicked the X close button, thereby killing all my precious tabs!
I have seen on a forum that this can be avoided by clicking File\Exit, but I’m already in the habit of Xing everything, and besides I needed my tabs back!
I found on another forum the name of the file sessionstore.bak, so I did a search and lo and behold it found a couple of session files in my Firefox profile directory. I cracked open the .bak one in notepad and there amidst loads of junk was the urls/tabs I had open.
How to
- I Searched for sessionstore.bak, and opened containing folder
- used ‘taskkill /im firefox.exe’ (yes windows xp does have a handy kill command :P),
- deleted sessionstore.js to the recycle bin,
- renamed sessionstore.bak to .js and
- started firefox again.
Firefox of course falls for my fake ‘crash’ and prompts me to recover my precious tabs. A swift click later and Lo and behold my tabs were restored!
I’ve now installed session manager add in again and set the ‘undo close window’ feature. Apparently Mozilla are going to integrate the feature in 3.1. (That is 3.1 not 3.01, so not just yet :'( ).
Enable Undo close window and set that number of tabs to high!