Local State causing crash upon Brave opening

[Jazuke]

Description of the issue:
Local State causing crash after attempting to open Brave. This occured after restarting my PC. Attempted to find a way to recover my losses of “Recently Closed” tabs that is VERY important to me, no dice so far. New Local State does NOT cause Crash.

Old Local State is 181 kb. Coding inside the old Local State might reveal WHY and HOW to resolve it. This, i do not understand how on my own, not a programmer or such.

Steps to Reproduce (add as many as necessary): 1. 2. 3.
1: Simply put old Local State into User Data.
2: Results in Crash after open attempt.
3: Can remove old Local State, but lose all progress i scarce remember all the details. Removing old Local State causes Brave to work just fine.

Actual Result (gifs and screenshots are welcome!):

Expected result:
Crash upon Open Brave Browser attempt by old Local State.

Reproduces how often:
Everytime, no exceptions.

Operating System and Brave Version(See the About Brave page in the main menu):
Windows 10.
Brave v1.57.47

Additional Information:
Have visited other Threads to find resolution. Not found any. Two things for my satisfication and to stop my…despair and sadness. Being able to open my old “Recently Closed Tabs” and for Brave to no longer crash from my old Local State, which probably holds all of my old Tabs. I understand very little of these things and all this is new to me, but i am guessing everything’s resolved if old Local State does not cause crash anymore and i obtain all my old Tabs. Meanwhile, i’ll try to re-obtain all my lost Tabs. Thanks for any help you’d give!

[Emi]

Session manager has nothing to do with Local State.

Local State when deleted barely breaks anything, only Sync, and other Browser wide settings you might have to re-check like analytics, which would be the default to be turned on, but Brave tells you about it when you delete Local State file.

Obviously when crashing, the session manager will get overridden, you will have to Ctrl+Shift+T to bring stuff back.

You have to edit the Local State file to fix it, if it is something in the Local State file, it must be a flag or a filter list.
There is nothing else that can cause the issue.

I say Filter lists, because the expires: support might create the crash upon checking something, so you can remove the whole section, or the expires property and see if it fixes it, then see if removing flags works, etc etc.

Brave does NOT open Windows 11 desktop

Well, then it is something in the Local State file causing the crash. I noticed today Brave released expires: support on custom lists to, which might cause the crash because I experienced it on Nightly once. but you said you didn’t add any. Could be something else, but to fix it, you have to open the old Local State file in a good editor, like VSCode, then you set it to JSON and then you Format it to look nice. and then keep trying until it works, since VSCode will tell you about errors in sy…

You could also run the Zipped version of Brave https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v1.56.20/brave-v1.56.20-win32-x64.zip

then remove any filter list manually from there, or maybe disable them or something. so you open zipped version, make changes, then close it and open the normal version, and so on.
I am sure it has to do with the expires support, but if not, you can always test resettnig other settings.

But the Session Manager, unless completely overridden, is independent from local state file which job has nothing to do with Profiles, it only index the profiles and that’s it, but it can be removed and nothing should happen besides losing adblock custom filters and lists, and sync maybe breaking, but anything else will stay intact in your profile.

[Jazuke]

Apologies. Been busy. Not using Windows 11, using Windows 10.

In Local State, as opening in txt file. Searching using “Find” do not find Expires or expires whatsoever. Flags? New to this. I tried looking around to find anything resembling “Flags” and unless i’m blind as a bat, i didn’t see any. As for Filters, they seem the same to me. Like Default same, and never caused me any issues. So i dunno if i did anything wrong there, before any of this…

I cannot find Session Manager file, if it even exists. I didn’t change any settings before the crash. I remember ONE site causing me issues for some reason, not opening any Pages properly and just black out. MangaIndex was the site. Prior to the crash.

I can still try fidgeting with my Filter List. But i doubt it has anything to do with this.

RESOLVED EDIT: HOLY PEPEHAPPINESS!!! So. I wen’t to my OLD Sessions, and learned i could COPY PASTE into the NEW Brave State. And EVERYTHING was recovered! I am ultra happy!

Thanks for all the help still, Emi! Now i can continue. I’ll start Storing a Backup of my Brave State and it’s Tabs for future, in case something like this ever happens again. I do not need to care much about my Old Local State, as my interests lied with recovering my Lost Tabs to begin with.

[Emi]

Well, you can keep a backup of the whole profile Default that’s your profile, everything will work, as long as you don’t reinstall Windows or something, which is when encryption key would change making removing all extensions (not the data, only the extensions installation), cookies, passwords and all that for security reasons.

You can also use Sync, which offers (brave://flags/#brave-sync-send-all-history) to even sync full history and keep all history 1:1, whatever you delete, will be reflected in all places where you are synching the history.
Just remember last word (the 25th) changes daily (you can get it here https://alexeybarabash.github.io/25th-brave-sync-word/), but the first 24 words stay the same.

Also, I always recommend using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-groups-extension/nplimhmoanghlebhdiboeellhgmgommi

Not exactly a session manager which would save automatically and all that, but it is the safest way to save groups in Brave, Chromium save groups feature in flags, is really buggy and can crash the browser. so you can save groups, and group them and have shortcuts to easily open them and all that. Collapse the groups, which will freeze them if they aren’t playing media or having a “Notifications” permission.

I mean, you don’t have to always have your 1000 tabs opened, when you can, save, close and re-open them and reopen them later.

I don’t like how Extensions manage sessions, so I would rather do it my own by groups, and you can automatically set rules to group tabs together and all that, so you should try it.

The crash happened because of the adblock, that’s why using VSCode was the easiest thing, to format the JSON fine, but it was fixed within 24h by Brave, it is good you didn’t delete all your profile data, you can still recover all you want, but yeah it was only Local State file causing the issue.

BTW I even made a video explaining how to fix it but nobody did it and Brave fixed it.
But this is all you had to do with VSCode:

So you can see how easy it was to fix it manually.

It’s not hard to edit the JSON once you know it even if it is not formatted but it is harder to see.
Just like that you can edit Preferences file and few others. or you need a SQLite program to edit the databases.

Brave has made it easy to expand its capabilities like the adblocker for how easy they have set it up, so I can’t complain about it lol