How to Recover Closed Tabs After Accidentally Quitting Chrome?
You know what we’re talking about: it’s a frustrating feeling when you realize that the desktop version of Chrome has closed or crashed due to 42 open tabs. And when you try to use the Restore option, you get … nothing. Goodbye to work; hello inner cry.
Luckily, Google has made it easy to recover what you’ve been working on in case this first and most obvious tool can’t help you – and there are many third-party extensions or utilities you can use to protect yourself. before your browser crashes (or you don’t).
Check your Chrome history
When you open Chrome again, click on the three-dot menu in the upper right corner and select History. You should see a number of sites in the Recently Closed section that correspond to each window you open. You can also open your full story; do a little search in it and find the moments when you started Chrome for the first time after closing it (for example, a long period of time when you did not use Chrome while sleeping). All of your previously open tabs should be listed above this breakpoint, if you haven’t forgotten ….
Always enable “Continue from where you left off”
In Chrome> Preferences, you’ll find the option to tell Chrome to restart all previously open tabs on startup. Scroll to the bottom of the settings page and select “Continue where you left off”. While that won’t stop a browser crash from potentially destroying your collection of open sites, it’s a quick and easy way to keep your workspace active – like having a healthy list of tabs occupying the top of your browser window.
Remember this quick keyboard shortcut
Simple keyboard shortcuts let you restart accidentally closed tabs. Press CTRL + Shift + T on PC and Command + Shift + T on Mac. It will not restore all missing sites in the browser, but it is a quick way to restore what you may have just accidentally closed.
Don’t allow yourself to close your browser too early
If you frequently close your browser by accident and are a Mac user, turn on Warn Before Exiting (in the Chrome menu) and use Command + Q to exit. You will be prompted to hold down the keyboard shortcut before Chrome actually exits, which reduces the chances of accidentally losing all tabs.
Purchase extensions or a digital magnifier.
If you have a tabbing out of control situation, there are many extensions to help you organize and save your tabs. Our favorite is Session Buddy , which has saved the day more times than we can count.
Otherwise, if you’ve closed your browser and don’t have (or too much) history to search, and have n’t configured any of these other methods, you’re going to have to get into the weeds. As Tessa Miller wrote for Lifehacker back in 2013:
[Find] the following four files in your user data directory :
-
Current Session -
Current Tabs -
Last Session -
Last Tabs
Copy these four files somewhere so you can work without losing anything. This way, you can always copy them back if something goes wrong.
… you can manually extract tabs from files using a string search program such as Strings (see picture). Run the program by transferring files to it and save them in another file. Most of these programs require the use of the command line, but there appear to be GUI versions as well (although I can’t find them at the moment). So, for example, if you save strings.exe to c:\foobar and copy four files there, you can extract the tabs like this:
C:\foobar>strings “current tabs” > ctabs.txt
C:\foobar>strings “last tabs” > ltabs.txt
C:\foobar>strings “current session” > csess.txt
C:\foobar>strings “last session” > lsess.txt
You can now open new *tabs.txt text files and see the URLs of the tabs you opened earlier. Please note that you may see a lot of duplicates as well as some tabs that you have closed.
*sess.txt will contain other information such as text you entered into forms on the page, so if you had a page open with a bunch of information you entered, you can restore it so you don’t have to start over from scratch. (For example, if I accidentally close this page, I can restore this text, which I am typing at this very moment, instead of trying to repeat it all again. Horror!)
You can also try making another copy of Last Session and Recent Tabs by renaming the files to Current Session and Current Tabs and overwriting the existing Current Session and Current Tabs files in your user data. Directory – This assumes that your browser has just crashed or closed and you need to immediately restore your previous session.
This article was originally published in 2013 and updated on April 6, 2020 by Emily Long and David Murphy. Our updates include the following: Checked links for accuracy, changed the title, and updated formatting to reflect the current Lifehacker style. Emily and David edited much of the article to remove the Q&A format and include the latest tips for managing browser tabs, but we also left Tessa Miller’s signature on the article as we cite her previous work in detail.