After Firefox crashes, how do I restore a Private Browsing Session, or the tabs?
Windows XP, Ser. Pk. #3, FF Ver. 20.0.1, I think that's all of the information that would be needed . . . if not, just ask me for anything else that you need. I'm going to refrain from restarting FF, or shutting down my computer until someone replies. Hopefully that'll help. I haven't restarted my computer or FF either since the crash. But here's what happened. I was browsing, clicked on a link, and the page was loading. Then both the reg. FF window, and the Private Browsing Session window closed. Then, the box asking what you want done, because FF crashed window appeared. I chose to send all of my information to FF, the web URLs, along with my email address, [email protected], to FF, and chose the restart FF option. The main FF window appeared with the white page, and the option to disable any previous tabs in case they're the reason FF crashed with the restart previous session, or start new one. I chose to restart the previous session. My main stuff all restarted, but the private browsing window, and tabs did not. I'm hoping there's a back door way, or some other way to get into the FF files and restore that private browsing session. Perhaps there's a way to at least get access to the URLs. That's all that I really need. I'm not going to restart anything as I said above, and I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me out. Thank you in advance.
All Replies (5)
I suspect that Firefox doesn't store session history for private windows, but you could try rescuing all the sessionstore files in your currently active personal settings folder (also known as your Firefox profile folder) just in case.
Help > Troubleshooting Information > "Show Folder" button
That should take you to the critical folder. Try copying all sessionstore.js and sessionstore.bak files to a different location (e.g., Documents) where there's no danger of Firefox overwriting them.
If you check the timestamps, can you tell which one has the best chance of having your old windows and tabs? Open that one in a text editor. You may need to turn on text wrapping. If you can remember any text from the URL or title of the page you were viewing, try searching in the text to see whether you can find it. If not, the quest may be futile.
Thank you jscher2000. That definitely gave me an idea where to look, but unfortunately wasn't helpful in recovering the crashed session. I was able to find a file marked last crash, and there was a number in that file. I noted the time, and looked into the crash ID files, and was able to find the Crash ID of the crash in question. I'll save them for now in case there's something I'm able to do with that information in the next couple of hours. Thank you again. You guys deserve a lot of praise. I love FF most of the time.
abcde
Modified by jfich
Data from a Private Browsing mode session is never stored on disk. so in case of crashes you lose all websites that were open in such a PB mode window.
The sessionstore.js file only stores the data from the regular session.
If Firefox regularly crashes then you should be careful with doing critical things in PB mode.
See also:
If you have submitted crash reports then please post the IDs of one or more crash reports that have this format:
- bp-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
You can find the IDs of the submitted crash reports on the about:crashes page.
- You can open the about:crashes page via the location bar, like you open a website, or open this page via "HT".
See:
Did you eventually found a way to solve this problem?
Modified by Daemorog