I closed my browser window to temporarily open a few dozen tabs in order to stay on the same profile without lagging too much, I then closed most of them. When I wanted to recover my browser window (using ctrl+shift+T or history > recent tabs), I discovered that there was a limit, and that the limit was extremely small. Nothing hinted at this limit or let me know there was one. Please, this is critical and I need to recover my 100+ tabs urgently.
Please do not reply with “Check your history to recover your tabs” as some tabs haven’t been opened in a few weeks, some in a few days, some even longer.
Please do not reply with “The limit is 10 items in the recently closed section”, I know that, I’m looking for a fix urgently.
The limit via the Extensions API is 25, meaning you won’t be able to recover more than that unless you have a backup of your profile folder. So it’s a good idea to have that in your backup routine.
Here’s a better UI for accessing the 25 most recently closed tabs and windows.
Yes, but this doesn’t help the current situation at all. I don’t want to know how to prevent it from happening again, I want to know how to recover all my tabs. Thank you.
This is such a joke, there’s an option to re-open closed tabs but at no point does it tell you there’s a limit and what is that limit… The confusion could be so easily avoidable, seriously. I lost so many important tabs I had set to read/manage later, all of that because of poor design…
@AgentH open tabs historically aren’t meant to be “saved.” If you want to keep them for the future or in case something happens, that’s what bookmarks are for.
Choosing not to bookmark things you want to keep puts you at risk of losing it all should your browser crash or anything happen to your device.
Beyond looking through History and hoping your tabs are there, I’m not sure what to tell you. If you hadn’t messed with much you should have even had Recent Tabs in History which may have had everything, but that likely is past now
But an example:
Notice how entries with windows that had multiple tabs say something like 2 Tabs? If you mouse over, it would then show the tabs that was there and even lets you restore the window with all tabs:
Though for this to work, you would have had to do this during the same session you closed it and would have had to make sure not a lot of other things were closed. Once you exceed thresholds, you’re just kind of out of luck and have nobody to blame but yourself.
I do understand it can be frustrating, especially if there were things you wanted to keep. Overall though, it’s just one of those things you need to have as a learning lesson. Remember that anything that’s important should ALWAYS have a backup. You never know what’s going to happen in life and all we can ever do is be prepared for the “worst case” scenarios.
@Mattches I will tag you in just to verify, pretty much out of luck in this situation since didn’t have any backup and nothing saved on bookmarks, right? Especially given that a week has past now.
Not sure what limit you’re talking about. If you mean how many items can appear in the Recent tabs menu then yes I guess there is a limit, as there is for all other browsers afaik.
If you wanted to recover these tabs, as @Saoiray is stating above, going to Menu --> History --> Recent tabs --> Restore window would be the way to go (note that afaik there is no limit on how many tabs can appear in a window here. So for example if I had 100 tabs open in a window, closed that window, then went to Menu --> History --> Recent tabs there would be an entry there that said 100 tabs > that I could restore).
If your tabs/window is not appearing there then unfortunately there’s not a lot to do here. I would highly recommend using a tab manager extension or saving your tabs as bookmarks more frequently. Note that you can right-click and select Bookmark all tabs... to do this easily:
And to confirm, I opened more than 100 tabs. Ended up closing but it let me open it all again.
You can see on the right that it shows 104 tabs. Then I just had to hit the Restore Window button from the expanded menu and it opened all 104 tabs. So that would have been a method to recover rather than whatever you were trying to do.
I very explicitly explained that since I opened a new window with a few dozen tabs, the window with 100+ tabs was lost, so no, I couldn’t go to recent tabs like I used to do.
I think I do have people to blame but myself, not telling the user a first closed window is fully lost when you close a second new one is extremely dumb and should not happen. I do have backups, but backups don’t store grouped tabs, so they’re completely useless in my case. Please fully read the original post before answering next time. Thank you.
Often can be stored in User Data. But more importantly referring to bookmarking tabs, which is a form of backup.
I read it in its entirety and answered everything completely. However, you just don’t like the answer. You made your complaint and Mattches (someone from Brave) was able to see it.
not telling the user a first closed window is fully lost when you close a second new one
@Saoiray I apologize, this first assumption was false and written in a hurry. What I meant is that closing a first window then closing multiple tabs in a new second window (at least 10) will override the first closed window in the recently closed section, this is not told to the user anywhere.
Demonstration: https://streamable.com/hk7s5i
But more importantly referring to bookmarking tabs, which is a form of backup.
Turns out there is a bug/missing feature where when you right click to open a folder which contains subfolders (originally being grouped tabs), it only opens the sites inside the root bookmark folder and not the subfolders. A couple bug reports were made about that in the past but every single one is answered with "The solution is to click “Open all”, which does not work.
Demonstration: https://streamable.com/u08uzr
Since I discovered this didn’t work, I discovered at the same time that my grouped tabs were in these multiple subfolders that were not opened, the solution is to open the main folder as well as every subfolder.
@Mattches Should I make a missing feature/bug report for this?
A window with 100 tabs counts as 1 item in the Restore stack. The stack can hold 25 items, so when AgentH opened “a few dozen tabs…then closed most of them” it wiped the other window off the stack. Normally there would be no issue with restoring more than 25 tabs if they’re all in the same window.
