Manually Restore / Recover lost Tabs

PLEASE HELP. My Mac crashed (frozen screen) with 4 different windows opened in brave browser, each of them containing ~20 really important tabs. After rebooting I opened brave, which offered to restore windows/tabs as usual. But this time nothing happened when I clicked it, only a blank window opened up.

When going to History, brave does not show/offer x number of tabs and cmd + shift + t does not work.

After reading all relevant forum posts regarding this issue, I quickly went to Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Sessions and made a copy of the folders Session Storage, session_profiles and Sessions. The Sessions folder contains 4 files, 2 of them called Session_unixtime and 2 called Tabs_unixtime. I checked them and each one of them got changed before the crash. “Yeah” I thought, closed brave and tried to replace the current files with them - but this didn’t work and there were no tabs after opening brave again.

Does anyone have experienced this or even have an answer/manual to restore tabs? Counting on @Mattches here :flushed:

THANK YOU

Operating System: macOS Catalina Version 10.15.7 (19H114)
Brave Version: 1.18.75 Chromium: 87.0.4280.101

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@emilino,
Unfortunately I’m not sure there’s a ton to be done here, although I’m not entirely sure why your tabs do not appear in the History menu. While this may not be satisfying, sometimes data loss happens when software crashes.

I’m curious, do all of the tabs you have at least appear in History – even if it’s not the Restore X tabs option?

Hey @Mattches, thanks for coming back to me. Yes, the active addresses before the crash do appear under brave://history/. Also all the lost ones I guess, but they have been in long time inactive windows so I am not able to remember. Unfortunately brave://history/ does not show tab clusters.

But isn’t there anything I can do with the Session_123 and Tabs_123 files from the backup?

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