Current Tabs, Current Session, Last Tabs, Last Session files gone in version 86+

[David Burton]

What happened to the Current Tabs, Current Session, Last Tabs, and Last Session files?

I keep a lot of web pages open at once, and I don't like to lose them. There are some sites which I intentionally keep open all the time. There are many others I leave open until I "get around to" dealing with them, in a few days, weeks or months.

When Chrome recovers from a crash, it doesn't always give me the option of restoring my tabs. I hate to lose them, so for years I've run a .bat script which saves my Chrome tabs, simply by copying the five files which contained that information. Here's the key part of my backup_chrome_tabs.bat script:

copy /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Local State" c:\chrome_tabs\

copy /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Current Session" c:\chrome_tabs\

copy /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Current Tabs" c:\chrome_tabs\

copy /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Last Session" c:\chrome_tabs\

copy /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Last Tabs" c:\chrome_tabs\

(There's more to it than that, because my script actually keeps several versions, but you get the idea.)

My script runs whenever Windows starts, and I can also run it manually (which I do after a Chrome crash).

Of course, I also wrote a companion script, restore_chrome_tabs.bat, which I can run to restore the backed-up Chrome tabs.

But in Chrome version 86.0.4240.111 it has all stopped working, because the "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Current*" and ""%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Last*" files are gone.

I installed Chromium for Windows, Version 88.0.4301.0 (Developer Build) (32-bit), and the Current* and Last* files are missing in it, too.

Instead, there now seems to be a folder called "sessions," which contains similar files:

10/22/2020  09:25 AM        16,483,414 Session_13247241247398859

10/22/2020  09:35 AM        16,737,956 Session_13247847244245926

10/22/2020  09:16 AM           643,052 Tabs_13247241247845795

10/22/2020  09:34 AM                 8 Tabs_13247847245239283

I expected that the "Local State" file would include a reference to the current files in the sessions folder, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Does anyone know how this works, now?  I'd like to fix my backup_chrome_tabs.bat and restore_chrome_tabs.bat scripts.

Dave

[Henning T. Heil]

Hello everybody,

I used a similar mechanism to backup my files via cron on linux, very useful and reliable. Unfortunatelly now this possibility is gone and my browser crashed, huge upset.

Is there any more technical insight how the saving of current tabs and session now works?

Regards,

Henning

[Nick L]

I too, am seeking information on the change.  After quite a bit of searching, I have found no mention of the change other than a couple of questions about it.  How can I learn more?  In my case I occasionally restore to an earlier state using a disk image backup.  I save a few files (e.g., Current Session, Current Tabs, History, Bookmarks, Last Session, Last Tabs) and copy them to the appropriate directory after restoring.  This seems to have worked out for me, but it's not clear what to do now. For example, in addition to the files in the Sessions folder, do I need to restore some other file that has the filename of the desired file in that folder?  Information, or pointers on where to look for information will be appreciated.

- Nick

[Nick L]

I've still not found more discussion of this change, except that I have found a description of a commit in a chromium code search that appears to be directly relevant

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/e27098ba216a56402f42f98c1689c6bfe139a4c0 (Rewrites session restore to use timestamp based file storage). It appears to give a clear description of the change????

I am quite ignorant about chromium/chrome development, am flailing when I try to find my way around  source.chromium.org, can't speak to the applicability  of this commit to any version of google chrome, and don't know if it has been superseded.  But, this may help....

[Joe Mason]

You can find out which exact releases of chrome include a specific commit by pasting the hash (e27098ba216a56402f42f98c1689c6bfe139a4c0 in your example) into the "Find Releases" box at https://omahaproxy.appspot.com/.

Commit e27098ba... initially landed in 86.0.4202.0

No merges found.

"No merges found" means it hasn't been backported to any older releases.

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[Nick L]

Thanks for this helpful pointer (I was nowhere close to finding this information in my searches.)