I just lost months of work when Brave crashed and deleted session history of all my open tabs.
I had 4-5 Brave windows with multiple tabs in each on MacOS.
I have closed the Brave browser completely, did something else, and when I clicked a link from another application that opens my default browser, which is Brave, Brave opened together with all my previously open tabs and windows and then froze and crashed without opening the newly clicked link. When I opened it again, there was nothing. Just one fresh new tab. Bookmarks are still there and history, but open tabs are gone.
Extremely sad and disappointed. Months of work wasted. I’m going back to Chrome.
I removed Brave from dock and changed default browser to Chrome again. Unfortunately.
To keep open tabs safe is one of the most important things for me. More than all privacy the browser is providing.
I feel your pain, Brave has multiple bugs that result in tabs being discarded and still lacks a built-in tab restore function. But you’re in luck because you use a Mac; you can restore your tabs using TimeMachine.
After stopping Brave, enter TimeMachine and go to ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/BudgetDatabase. You’ll see files named Cookies, Cookies-Journal, CURRENT, Current Session, Current Tabs, and CustomDictionary.txt.
Select all these files and go back to a date when they were good and then click Restore. You’ll be prompted about the fact that some files with those names already exist, just replace them.
This may not be the ideal way to recover your tabs, but it worked for me.