A refresh moves to old profile to the "Old Firefox Data" folder on the desktop, so you can check the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file and the sessionstore-backups folder in that folder on the desktop.

You can look at this tool to inspect a compressed sessionstore file.

• https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html

I see that folder on my desktop. It was created today about the time I did this. But, there is no sessionstore.jsonlz4 file present (at least by searching with explorers search function). I do see a folder called 5120jgru.default, dated today. There is a sessionstore-backups folder there, but no files in that folder. But, when I did a search using "*.jsonlz4" - it found several files created 5/27 - for example:

1590611088662.b6aa16f2-badd-4558-aaf4-b07dd85ca96e.first-shutdown.jsonlz4

1590611088661.248a4f2e-beae-41bb-88e0-813b6c46eb77.main.jsonlz4

1590593702192.1cb9f2c6-7966-4979-b5e8-eb6170249023.main.jsonlz4

bookmarks-2020-05-27_51988_+1KLK4lxgwyzkrr4z4xBQQ==.jsonlz4

1590552000097.3b1a6bec-4936-4ea5-9ee9-d1b7003695fc.main.jsonlz4

I don't know what the .main.jsonlz4 files are about.

In what folder are these files located ?

This file is a compressed bookmarks jsonlz4 backup with 51988 items (bookmarks, folders, separators) from May 27th.

• bookmarks-2020-05-27_51988_+1KLK4lxgwyzkrr4z4xBQQ==.jsonlz4

Is that a backup in your current profile folder ?

Hi Matt, I think we have discussed session history files before. Sorry your luck ran out again.

You might try using Recuva to see whether it can find the erased contents of the sessionstore-backups folder. This is a slightly odd case because the profile folder was moved. I don't know where the erased files will be "found" so probably it's necessary to let the program look everywhere.

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

• 1590611088662.b6aa16f2-badd-4558-aaf4-b07dd85ca96e.first-shutdown.jsonlz4
• 1590611088661.248a4f2e-beae-41bb-88e0-813b6c46eb77.main.jsonlz4
• 1590593702192.1cb9f2c6-7966-4979-b5e8-eb6170249023.main.jsonlz4
• 1590552000097.3b1a6bec-4936-4ea5-9ee9-d1b7003695fc.main.jsonlz4

Based on my profile, these look like the names of files in the datareporting path, which shouldn't contain any data as personal as tab addresses.

Cor-el,

All those files are in the "old firefox data/5120jgru.default folder".

THAT bookmark file is also in the above "old firefox data" folder. IS that a possible source for restoring my lost tabs?

You got me thinking, and I did a search in my current profile folder just to see what jsonlz4 files were in there, and found several more *.jsonlz4 folders created 5/25: (and others from other dates):

recovery.jsonlz4

1590625638674.1e5fa505-f575-466d-888a-83be5a4cfd5a.event.jsonlz4

1590622531128.d1cf6462-f093-4511-a004-665dd9581545.main.jsonlz4

1590614838644.4ca1a3df-f161-454d-85e9-26062f2fe37e.event.jsonlz4

1590612306232.c06c822e-925c-452d-8048-ddcea2e00f20.main.jsonlz4

1590611925207.adc454be-3089-40cb-bda6-318f59858876.third-party-modules.jsonlz4

bookmarks-2020-05-27_51988_+1KLK4lxgwyzkrr4z4xBQQ==.jsonlz4

Hi Jscher,

YES. We have. lol

This all started with a tab that seemed to stop responding, and Firefox locked up. I killed that session hoping to get past that. The first restore opened all tabs, but wihout id info, and also my right click menu changed - it got real long - and when I tried clicking on SEARCH GOOGLE, or OPEN IN NEW TAB - those functions stopped working. So I figured kill firefox again, and reboot the computer, and that is when I did the OPEN IN SAFE MODE, and then the REFRESH that got me here, arghh.

I don't know what you mean about the profile file moved, though?

I will download Recuva, but I am not familiar with what it does?

Jscher,

So I installed recuvva. It is asking me what type of file do i want to recover?

Do I select ALL FILES?

Jscher, So I installed recuvva. It is asking me what type of file do i want to recover? Do I select ALL FILES?

Does it let you specify the file extension .jsonlz4? If not, I guess all files.

That seems to be the only logical choice under FILE TYPE (I selected ALL FILES).

Then I click NEXT, and it asks for FILE LOCATION. It offered a few choices like I'M NOT SURE, RECYCLE BIN. MY DOCUMENTS, and SPECIFIC LOCATION (I selected I'M NOT SURE)

But then after I click NEXT it says RECUVVA IS NOW READY TO SEARCH

SO, I clicked START, and it started SANNING ... but I don't know how it knows that I am looking for a .jsonlz4 file?

---

Oh. it found LOTS of files. I switched to advanced mode on the result list, and I could enter a search for .jsonlz4 files. FOUND LOTS of .jsonlz4 files.

OK, so I sorted the list of files found by Recuvva by date, and six of the .jsonlz4 were created today, 5/27:

The largest is called recovery.jsonlz4 with 22,040 KB. (The others are smaller and seem unlikely candidates, but what do I know. Two have the word MAIN in them, one has FIRST SHUTDOWN in it, and one has BOOKMARKS in it and is the second largest at 5,139 KB).

The path of the recovery.jsonlz4 is C:\users\matt\appData\roaming\Mozilla\firefox\profiles\5120jgru\default\sessionstore-backups

Note that using Recuva to recover a file doesn't guarantee that that file isn't corrupted as it is quite possible that some clusters have been reused in the meantime.

You can test the file with this tool:

• https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html

So, Recuvva said the recovery.jsonlz4 file was in EXCELLENT STATE, with NO OVERWRITTEN CLUSTER DETECTED.

I had Recuvva recover it to a USB DRIVE (I tried the original location but Recuvva warned me not to do that - so I recovered it on the USB stick drive).

I opened that SCROUNGER.HTML page, and opened the recovery.jsonlz4 file with scrounger.

I copied the first several lines from the scrounger.html window, and it looks like this:

========================================

{"version":["sessionrestore",1],"windows":[{"tabs":[{"entries":[{"url":"about:home","title":"New Tab","cacheKey":0,"ID":4009476995,"docshellUUID":"{fcd002f0-5ed1-4782-9e64-f883c38e5db7}","resultPrincipalURI":null,"triggeringPrincipal_base64":"eyIzIjp7fX0=","docIdentifier":6442450956,"persist":true}],"lastAccessed":1581210476765,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"index":1,"userContextId":0,"userTypedValue":"","userTypedClear":0,"image":"chrome://branding/content/icon32.png"},{"entries":[{"url":"about:home","title":"about:home","cacheKey":0,"ID":4009476702,"docshellUUID":"{790b9948-c6a0-4f33-b4b4-a01c211ca52e}","resultPrincipalURI":null,"triggeringPrincipal_base64":"eyIzIjp7fX0=","docIdentifier":2147483668,"persist":true}],"lastAccessed":1581210329521,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"index":1,"userContextId":0,"userTypedValue":"","userTypedClear":0,"image":""},{"entries":[{"url":"https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0/whatsnew/all/?oldversion=62.0.3","title":"What’s new with Firefox - More privacy, more protections.","cacheKey":0,"ID":4009477010,"docshellUUID":"{665609c1-bf90-4420-965f-30a2cd5548a2}","originalURI":"https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0/whatsnew/?oldversion=62.0.3","resultPrincipalURI":"https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox

========================================

Is that a good file? Will it recover my lost session?

What do I do with it? Do I copy it back to the profiles directory? And if so, which one? Or do I copy and rename it to another file in my Current firefox profile, which was:

C:\Users\matt\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\tp1eeqsr.default-1590611089156

Oh, and is that BOOKMARKS file one I need to recover also? And if so, where does it go.

And what do I do next to finish recovering?

I'm kind of excited ... this feels like a good ending coming ... :-) (Maybe tomorrow, as it's 11:07PM here in Michigan now).

So, Recuvva said the recovery.jsonlz4 file was in EXCELLENT STATE, with NO OVERWRITTEN CLUSTER DETECTED. ... I opened that SCROUNGER.HTML page, and opened the recovery.jsonlz4 file with scrounger. I copied the first several lines from the scrounger.html window, and it looks like this: ... Is that a good file? Will it recover my lost session?

If the Scrounger didn't give any errors when you extracted URLs, then the file content is in good shape.

What do I do with it? Do I copy it back to the profiles directory?

So Firefox is going to look for sessionstore.jsonlz4 first, at the main level of your currently active profile folder. If it doesn't find that, it will look in the sessionstore-backups folder for recovery.jsonlz4. Probably the easiest thing is to make sure all Firefox can find is the recovery.jsonlz4 you copy into the current sessionstore-backups folder.

Oh, and is that BOOKMARKS file one I need to recover also?

I thought you had your bookmarks already. No?

OK, I did not do anything after I opened the recovery.jsonlz4 in the scrounger.html

How do I make it extract URL's? Do I click on SCROUNGE URLs? (What is the SAVE LIST for?)

Do I need to do anything with SAVE JSON file on scrounger.html? --- Regarding bookmarks, I might have them all...I can't be sure, since the list was so large to begin with, I can't really tell by just looking at the bookmarks as they exist right now.

I seem to recall that I saw the REFRESH process update bookmarks? If so, where would REFRESH have grabbed bookmarks from? If that was up-to-date, then maybe I am ok. I will try to think of a recent bookmark I did in the last few days, anf see if it is still in my bookmarks list.

OK, so I clicked on the SCROUNGE URL's button, I believe the Processing... message popped up after I clicked SCROUNGE URL's

---

After about 20 minutes...this is all that page looks like ...

Is this working right?

After about 20 minutes...this is all that page looks like ...

Sounds like it hung up. Usually it should finish in under a minute, although I generally have 75-100 tabs open in my tests.

But just because the scripts on my page can't finish processing it doesn't mean Firefox will have a problem. You didn't get the error that the structure was invalid, which was the critical thing to verify.

You posted in this reply that you have the same bookmarks backup in your current profile folder as in the folder on the desktop, so it is very likely that your bookmarks were carried over successfully.

• [/questions/1288550#answer-1316432]
• bookmarks-2020-05-27_51988_+1KLK4lxgwyzkrr4z4xBQQ==.jsonlz4

You can possibly create a new profile as a test and copy recovery.jsonlz4 to that new profile at the main profile level and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4.

See "Creating a profile":

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles

Your instruction that I should follow now, is this?

So Firefox is going to look for sessionstore.jsonlz4 first, at the main level of your currently active profile folder. If it doesn't find that, it will look in the sessionstore-backups folder for recovery.jsonlz4. Probably the easiest thing is to make sure all Firefox can find is the recovery.jsonlz4 you copy into the current sessionstore-backups folder.

I also just activated 'Restore previous session" under the GENERAL ... STARTUP preferences. I thought I had that activated before all this, did the REFRESH I did yesterday undo 'Restore previous session" ?

Does firefox need 'Restore previous session" to be activated in order to look use the recovery.jsonlz4 in the current sessionstore-backups folder?

Also, I just looked in my current profile folder, and two things confusing me about what is in the sessionstore-backups folder ... First there are two files therein - recovery.jsonlz4 and recovery.baklz4. When I copy the recovery.jsonlz4 file that Recuvva restored, should I do anything with the recovery.baklz4? Second, I noticed that the sizes of the two files right now, are 22,616 kb, and the Recuvva file size is 22,040 kb , which makes me wonder if the file Recuvva restored is large enough to hold the multiple windows and tabs that I hope to get restored? Shouldn't the file Recuvva got me be a LOT LARGER (assuming the current files in sessionstore-backups represents only about 12 tabs in one window that I have active in Firefox right now?