Windows and tabs disappeared after hard reboot with pending update

[Dan Koppel]

Hello,

I'm posting this Chrome question here because I was told there's lots of developers and experts in Chrome here. And this is a hard question that requires expert level knowledge. Here it is:

I have a Mac Air laptop and use the Chrome browser. Normally, if my machine gets sluggish, I do the following:

I simply press the power button for a couple of seconds and the machine quickly turns off. I then restart and the browser fires up again, but it only shows 1 window containing a single tab with Google homepage displayed. However, at the same time, there’s a small pop-up window that says “Restore”. Just clicking on that brings back all the Chrome windows, each having the original set of tabs.

However, recently, the above did not work and I lost all my windows and tabs. It happened like this:
I did the same routine as described above, but after clicking on the “Restore” button, nothing happened. It basically “brought back” a single window with a single tab. All previous windows and tabs were gone. Later, I put 2 and 2 together and realized that, before hitting the power button, the usual triple vertical dots on the upper-right side of Chrome had been replaced with something else, and this indicated a pending Chrome update (I looked at another Mac and its Chrome showed the same thing). So I surmised that when an update is forced upon the user, after rebooting, the usual protection of “restore” fails entirely. Somehow the update wipes away the record of the previous session’s windows and tabs. I also checked under "History/Recently closed", but the disappeared tabs did not appear at all. All traces of them seem to be gone!

Question: How can I get the windows and tabs back, in any form whatsoever (ie. a text file showing sets of URL’s would be fine)? Thank you!

[Alan Screen]

This sounds similar to the known issue reported in https://crbug.com/130066.