Join the Mozilla’s Test Days event from Dec 2–8 to test the new Firefox address bar on Firefox Beta 134 and get a chance to win Mozilla swag vouchers! 🎁

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Browser crashed, sessions lost, manager won't restore; Help!

  • 2 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

57.0.4 Browser crashed, Recently closed tabs and Recently closed windows are gone, blindsided by the updated FF version. I installed a new Mysession manager plugin but that doesn't restore the ones I lost. Where are the old sessions stored and how can I restore them? The browser is not offering that function any longer! Please understand I'm not a developer or programmer and complex solutions don't work for me.

57.0.4 Browser crashed, Recently closed tabs and Recently closed windows are gone, blindsided by the updated FF version. I installed a new Mysession manager plugin but that doesn't restore the ones I lost. Where are the old sessions stored and how can I restore them? The browser is not offering that function any longer! Please understand I'm not a developer or programmer and complex solutions don't work for me.

Modified by germeten

All Replies (2)

more options

Also, why do you guys make yourselves so difficult to reach for support? When a computer is acting up, the website password & login hurdles you create are often insurmountable. An email address would be much more user-friendly.

more options

Firefox uses the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file in the profile folder to store session data. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file is only present when Firefox is closed. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file is created from recovery.jsonlz4 when you close Firefox and is removed and copied to previous.jsonlz4 when you start Firefox to make is possible to restore the session at any time.

Backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox Profile Folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data. Do NOT close Firefox when Firefox is already running.

You will normally find these files in the sessionstore-backups folder:

  • previous.jsonlz4 (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 from previous session that was loaded successfully)
  • recovery.jsonlz4 (latest version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • recovery.baklz4 (previous version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)

You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file (make sure to backup the current sessionstore.jsonlz4).

Firefox 56+ releases compress the files in the sessionstore-backups folder and sessionstore.jsonlz4 with LZ4 (.jsonlz4 instead of .js), so it is no longer easy to inspect them.

See also: