Recovering lost tabs after extension update or removal
deanoemcke opened this issue · comments
This is the official issue for users trying to recover from tab loss due to an update of the extension, or following removal/disabling of the extension. This is the number one pain point of the extension and here I will attempt to address why this is an issue, and what you can do if affected by it.
Overview:
Why do my tabs disappear when the extension updates or is removed?
What is the safe way to remove the extension?
What is the safe way to update the extension
What should I do if I have lost tabs?
How to recover lost tabs with The Great Suspender
How to recover lost tabs without The Great Suspender
My suspended tab says "This site cannot be reached"
Why do my tabs disappear when the extension updates or is removed?
The Great Suspender works by redirecting a tab to a new url in order to 'suspend' it. This means that the tab is now controlled by the extension process. When the extension updates or is disabled or uninstalled, this process is killed and all tabs that belong to it are removed from the browser.
For this reason, I try to keep the number of updates to the extension to a minimum.
The extension does come with an inbuilt tab recovery system that will automatically detect and reload lost tabs in aftermath of an update or extension crash. And in the event of an update, a session restore point is automatically created in the Session History page and can be restored manually.
What is the safe way to remove the extension?
If you want to uninstall the extension, please unsuspend all tabs before doing so. This is the only way to prevent those tabs from disappearing. This can be done easily by clicking the 'Unsuspend all tabs' option in the extension popup menu. Or more manually by visiting every suspended tab and manually reloading it.
Please note that if using the 'Unsuspend all tabs' option, you will need to do this once for each chrome window you have open.
If you failed to unsuspend all tabs before uninstalling and have lost tabs, please refer to the section below entitled "How to recover lost tabs without The Great Suspender".
Please note, uninstalling the extension will also permanently remove all extension data including tab history and extension options. Reinstalling the extension will not enable you to do any sort of recovery.
I would recommend anyone wanting to remove the extension to first back up their tabs using another extension called "Session buddy". This tool will allow you to back up all your tabs and restore them again at a later date. Please be aware that those tabs suspended at the time the session buddy backup is performed will not have their correct urls. These links will only work as long as The Great Suspender is currently installed on your browser. If you want the real urls in your session buddy backup, then you will need to unsuspend all your tabs first.
What is the safe way to update the extension?
Unfortunately chrome does not give the user the ability to manage their own extension updates. As soon as a new release is made available on the webstore, this update is automatically pushed to users.
I have done my best to mitigate the potential for lost tabs during an update by prompting users to export a backup of their tabs before accepting the new update.
As mentioned above, a session restore point will also automatically be created to save a record of your open tabs before the update. You can then recover any lost tabs via this restore point from the Session History screen accessible from the extension Options page.
What should I do if I have lost tabs?
If you have lost tabs due to the extension being removed then refer to the section below entitled "How to recover lost tabs without The Great Suspender".
If you have lost tabs due to the extension being disabled, then first re-enable the extension, and then refer to the section below entitled "How to recover lost tabs with The Great Suspender".
If you have lost tabs but the extension still seems to be installed and running, then refer to the section below entitled "How to recover lost tabs with The Great Suspender".
Before continuing, it's worth checking first that you have not simply switched chrome profiles. If you have multiple chrome profiles, then each one will have a separate record of tab history.
How to recover lost tabs with The Great Suspender
The extension comes with its own tab history management UI to help users recover from lost tabs. Go to the extension options page (from 'settings' in the popup or 'options' when right-clicking on the extension). Then in the settings sidebar click on 'Session management'. This will show you your most recent tab sessions. You can click on each session to see more detail on the individual windows and tabs it contains.
To reload a session, simply click the 'reload' link. This will reload all windows and tabs in an 'unsuspended' state. If your session contains a very large number of tabs, then you might instead want to click 'resuspend' which will be much faster as it reloads the tabs in a suspended state.
If for some reason the missing tabs are not in your recent sessions, then please follow the guide below for recovering lost tabs without using The Great Suspender.
If you have access to system backups, you may be able to restore old 'recent sessions' from these backups. The recent sessions are stored in an IndexedDB database at Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/ and Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.leveldb/
How to recover lost tabs without The Great Suspender
You can attempt to recover lost tabs by using chromes in-built history page. Navigate to chrome://history in a new tab and you will be shown a list of tabs you have visited in the past grouped by date and showing the most recent at the top. Somewhere in this list you will have a record of all the tabs you lost. However it can be a bit tricky to find them as they are mixed in with all the tabs you have visited and purposely closed as well.
For example, if you opened a tab one week ago, and it got suspended and you never revisited that tab, then in chrome history, it will be grouped with all the tabs from one week ago.
You can try searching for "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg" to find tabs that were suspended. This may help narrow down the list.
If you do find a lost tab in this list, there is a chance that when you try to reopen it, it will take you to a blank page saying "This site cannot be reached". Please refer to the section below on how to recover these tabs.
My suspended tab says "This site cannot be reached"
It can happen that when you open a suspended tab link, or try to unsuspend a tab, you will see a blank page with the text "This site cannot be reached". And it will have a strange url that looks something like this: chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#ttl=Google&uri=https://www.google.com.
This is most likely due to the fact that you no longer have The Great Suspender installed in your browser. The easiest way to recover these tabs is to reinstall the extension, and then reload the page.
Should this fail for any reason (which would happen if you tried to open this url in another browser like firefox, or from a device that does not support extensions such as an android phone), then as a last resort you can manually edit the url to recover the tab. Delete everything before the &uri= text in the address bar and the page should reload corrently.
ie: in the example above you would end up with https://www.google.com.
will clicking "update extensions now" in the chrome extensions page update to the latest webstore version even if auto updates are disabled?
in chrome's history, you can search for "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg" to find tabs that were suspended.
lastly, I'd suggest adding some info about what files TGS uses to store sessions. Yesterday for some reason all my suspended tabs were closed again, but the extension stayed enabled and had no history for what tabs I had. I was able to get them back by restoring the indexeddb from a backup earlier that day. (I actually wasn't home to use my computer at all between when the backup happened and when all the suspended tabs disappeared…).
@adcurtin I don't believe so. i prevent automatic updates by setting the 'max deploy percentage' to zero.
As detailed here: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish
It is slightly ambiguous, but it does state: "The max deploy percentage control only applies to auto-update for existing users. New users always get the latest version of your app."
I think this also means that existing users are literally unable to receive updates. This is why I suggest uninstalling and reinstalling as the only way around this.
What about https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/runtime#event-onUpdateAvailable? It sounds like that would let you detect an impending update.
@uecasm I can't believe I have never noticed this event. It's probably exactly what I need. I'll try it out. Thanks for the heads up! Unfortunately, it's going to take another update to get it implemented :(
Is there any way to recover 'session management' sessions without the extension? I'd love to be able to export them to my new device...
@mengsel In the session management page, there is a link to export each session. This produces a text file with each (unsuspended) url on a new line.
The Great Suspender has no way to import these sessions on another computer, but you can do exactly that with Session Buddy, another chrome extension which I mention in the information above.
Is there a way to delete this line from a list of URLS? I'm not that familiar with regex.
chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#ttl= ... &uri= DIRECT URL HERE
I can't do it anymore, because devs of this plugin have added #ttl= which has different text in every tab, therefore it gets added to suspender URL, previously I just removed the extension string (find/replace N++) and I got direct links, because they all were the same, now I'm having problems because ttl is added.
EDIT:
I have never made a regex expression, but this seems to be working
(chrome-extension:\W\W.*\Wsuspended.html#ttl=.*&uri=)
EDIT2: Tried it on .csv db table exported from SessionBuddy database and there it didn't work, it selected more than this line. But it worked on csv file which was in multiple lines.
@rudolphos what exactly are you trying to do? if you want to export a list of urls in all your tabs, you can do exactly that from the session management screen within the extension (as mentioned in my reply to @mengsel above)
@deanoemcke When tab is suspended it now has a longer URL including tab title, which messes up 'order by url' feature in SessionBuddy if there are also other unsuspended tabs, which can cause duplicates if sessions are merged. This is important for me as I have sessions with 180+ tabs and many more saved and modified, merged.
I usually export Session URL list as CSV from sessionbuddy and previously it was easier to remove the sessionbuddy uri= part, but now that there are various titles in it, I had to make regex which seems to be working on one-per-line tab list, but it didn't work on db table exported from SessionBuddy.
The extension are lost all my tabs and cannot recover from history, I am so sad, it was collect a couple of months...
The "Session management" tab is empty; the extension does not appear to be saving my sessions. Is there anything I can do to rectify this — automatically or manually?
@owenblacker if you open the chrome developer console on the session management screen, are there any errors on the page?
This other person might be having the same issue: #464
Would be good to find out more info on this!
@deanoemcke I only just saw this notification and, while it's been continuously the case for some time now, I just went to the Session management tab and it is saving my sessions again now. I'm afraid I have no idea what's changed between those two :(
@zxweed I can recommend Session Buddy. Its awesome, only downside is no synchronization between installations, but that can be done manually by export/import.
Acckkk - I just lost a saved tab session by installing the current Alpha version (because of the Error 400 / gsScrollPos / Google issue) ... I thought saving it was enough and didn't know I had to export it. Is there any way to get it back? I looked at previous posts in this thread - going back through my closed tabs history won't work as the session spanned several months.
[whimper]
@hugegit loading the unpacked alpha version shouldn't affect the webstore version. I've currently got both running (with only one set to auto-suspend tabs, to reduce confusion). If you uninstalled the webstore version and then installed the alpha, I'm not sure if recovery is possible. Maybe there's a backup of the indexeddb file that @adcurtin mentions above?
So the GS won't update automatically when 7.0 comes, so that you can unsuspend all tabs before forcing an update? Did I understand correctly? Also, will the old "suspended" links work? I.e. if I have them stored in some session management extension, will they open and work correctly after the update?
I ran into an interesting problem related to updating.
I have multiple computers connected to my chrome account. I upgraded my main computer to 7.0, and disabled the webstore version. Well, disabling the webstore version synced to my other computers, and disabled the extension there as well. ~110 extension tabs were closed.
@adcurtin yes. that is expected. re-enabling it should restore all your tabs automatically?
if you want that setup, then you're best to just set the v6.30 on your main computer to 'time to suspend -> never' which will essentially disable it just on that computer.
Session Buddy sucks. It's never done a good job auto saving sessions for me. It either doesn't save them until I open it, in which case it saves immediately, or it doesn't save them on a regular basis.
I recommend Tabs Backup and Restore. It's something like 6 years old but still works perfectly. It can be set to backup anywhere from once a minute to once every four hours, and can save up to 80 backups. And IT ALWAYS WORKS.
Hi @deanoemcke you mentioned that on re-enabling the extension your tabs should be restored. I think I found a case this isn't true. I'm logged into chrome from my laptop and desktop. I disabled the extension via my laptop and then arriving at work today enabled via the desktop. Now all suspended tabs on both laptop and desktop are gone. disabling and re-enabling from laptop doesn't help and the sessions don't hold the missing tabs. Thankfully i have Recently Closed Tabs extension installed so I can recover but just wanted to flag the case where you can disable from one machine and re-enable from another and in that case it won't automatically restore tabs.
Other than this crux of an issue I'm very grateful for your plugin.
Cheers
@deanoemcke You should have never released the update if this wasn't fixed. I'm losing too many tabs.
If you can not fix this then why not find someone who can?
I liked it better when I just had to clear cookies, at least then I didn't lose tabs.
I never even knew there was a tab limit. Apparently there is.
You obviously need to outsource and get this fixed.
This update fixes one issue only to create and even bigger issue.
I just used the restore session option and wow made my junk freeze for a while. I just wanted to restore one window. Make it to where we can choose each Tab or each window like you can with the extension One Tab.
I don't need all this opening all at once.
WARNING to others if you are going to restore a session then close out all windows then open Chrome and do it or else you're gonna get duplicate tabs. Such a huge mess.
@dragonspirit1185 it sucks that you lost tabs, and I'm sorry. I know how frustrating it can be. However, your last comment is not appropriate. Dean has provided this awesome extension for free, and has been very careful to avoid this problem as much as possible. Chrome does not make it easy.
Please do not come to the github and complain and whine like that, as it is not productive. Being an ass to an individual providing a service to you and receiving nothing in return is very poor form.
If you can not fix this then why not find someone who can?
You obviously need to outsource and get this fixed
yes, you are being an ass, and that's putting it rather politely. Those are not constructive statements, and sharing your frustrations in that manner does nothing to help fix the issue. I don't know Dean at all, and the majority of my interaction with him has been here in this issue. However, your comments still offended me enough to come here and tell you to stop, I can't imagine how he must've felt.
Please, stop polluting this issue with your complaints unless you actually have something to contribute.
@dragonspirit1185 Open source software is essentially outsourced by definition. Either fix the problem yourself (as a pull request) or find someone else who can.
@adcurtin is right; your comments were unhelpful an inappropriate. The developer is doing everything he can to avoid this not-completely-avoidable problem.
@dragonspirit1185 i'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "if this wasn't fixed?". you mean potential tab loss when updating? is that the "even bigger issue" you refer to? just to be clear, this is not an issue that has been created in the most recent release. it has been an ongoing issue every time i push an update to the chrome webstore. i'm also not sure what you mean by the "tab limit". can you clarify?
due to the way the extension works, there is absolutely nothing i can do about suspended tabs disappearing during an update. the code that restores tabs after the update seems to work well for almost everybody, but there seems to be always a small percentage of people for whom it fails.
in regards to your usage of the session manager. perhaps you haven't realised, but you can actually just reopen a single window from a session instead of the whole session. you need to expand the session containing the window you want to restore, then next to the 'window 1' (or whatever number), click the 'resuspend' button. you could alternatively click the 'reload' button, but this will cause every tab in the window to load from the original website. from the sounds of it, that's what you've been doing. because if you choose 'resuspend' instead, it can actually open a window with quite a large number of tabs pretty quickly.
i'm sorry that i've caused a loss of tabs for you. i do understand how frustrating that can be. as you know, the impetus for this release was to fix the youtube cookies bug. and i made a call that it was more important to fix that at the cost of a few users suffering from a loss of tabs.
rest assured i'm doing everything i can to get to the root cause of these issues. unfortunately i don't have the resources to outsource any of this. but as @liamjohnston said, you're welcome to contribute if you're able.
This happened to me too today. Browser just froze while I was using it and wiped hundreds of suspended tabs, session list is empty. Thankfully I had a session backup in another extension but this is is still a serious issue.
Well, I just had to disable the extension in opera so I could get it to update to the new version, so that youtube would stop breaking. Lost all my suspended tabs, none are available in the recovery, and now youtube at least plays videos, but all the buttons are broken. So not good!
@sclient for the youtube button issue, it sounds like it might be the same as this person: #713
i have not been able to replicate this, and can't see how this extension could break another website. but keen to investigate more. does refreshing the youtube page help? what happens if you disable the extension and then refresh again? (after unsuspending all your tabs first of course).
are you familiar with the chrome developer tools console? if so, can you tell me if there are any errors in the console?
I'm in the opposite position. I have waited for the extension to update but it has not as of today 9 Sep. Actually, I only knew there was a new update when I was using a portable Chrome for some testing. Is there any chance I accidentally skipped the "before update" warning as you mentioned in the first post? (I have never seen any warning related your extension since I installed it though).
Btw, will this extension be integrated features from your other one "The Great Discarder"?
@nmhung1985 the 'before update' warning will only on a subsequent update (ie. not on this current update). are you asking if i will be incorporating features from the great discarder into this extension? or the other way around (incorporating new features from this upcoming release into the great discarder)?
The great discarder has diverged pretty significantly from this extension in terms of code, and most new features from this extension are not relevant to the great discarder. however, i do plan on doing some work on the other extension once this one is out the door.
From the description, I thought TGD was superior and you were making it for testing, so I was just curious if you would integrate its advanced features into TGS in the future. Well, it looks like TGD and TGS will be 2 separate extensions for a long time.
However, the main thing is the TGS extension has not updated on my Chrome. Do you know the reason and what would you suggest to force the update? Of course I can just uninstall and re-install, but I'll wait for your answer before doing so.
Oh well, I found the "Developer" method to force updating. However, it turned out TGS still could not be updated (while another extension was forced to update successfully). Guess I'll have to uninstall and re-install TGS manually.
@nmhung1985 i'm in the middle of a selective rollout. if you wait a few more days the webstore version will update automatically. if you want it now, then uninstalling and reinstalling is the way to go. Just make sure you unsuspend or backup all your tabs first :)
@deanoemcke So if we just wait, we will get the new version without losing ANY of our suspended tabs?
@Boscop If you just wait, you will at some point be automatically updated to the latest version without any warning (assuming you are still on v6.30).
When this happens, any tabs you had suspended will disappear, leaving only those tabs that were unsuspended still showing in your browser.
After the update, the extension will attempt to recreate those suspended tabs that disappeared.
In most cases, this process works flawlessly. However, there always seems to be a few users for whom this process fails.
The best thing you can do to protect yourself is install another extension which keeps a running backup of the tabs you have open.
See this issue thread for recommendations: #742
That way, if you do suffer from a loss of tabs, you can easily recover them from an automatic backup.
@deanoemcke Thanks. Yes, I'm still on 6.30. I installed "Tabs Backup & Restore" but it hasn't been updated in years. Which extension do you recommend, that will definitely prevent suspended tab loss when TGS updates?
@Boscop i'm using "Tabs Backup & Restore" and it's working fine for me. It may not be maintained, but i assume it will continue to work fine unless Google updates chrome in such a way as to break existing extension API functionality.
I'm using "Session Buddy" and it works like a charm. It's what's saved all my lost tabs when this extension has decided to spontaneously update (it automatically records last N sessions).
SessionBuddy -- easily convert TGS sessions [TUTORIAL]
As published on SessionBuddy Google Group
-
Click on the sessions you want to convert, or select a few from Session Buddy's left panel by holding CTRL key.
-
click on the cogwheel 'settings' icon and then Export.
-
Click: JSON > Select 'Sessions, Windows, Titles, URLs' > Ensure that 'Selected' is chosen > Save to File.
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Open Notepad++ (download link). Open the Json file saved earlier.
-
Click CTRL+H for Search and Replace. > Under 'Search Mode' choose 'Regular Expression'.
-
Next to:
'Find What': Copy this line:
"url": "chrome-extension://[a-z]{32}/suspended.html#ttl=.*(http[s]?\:\/\/.[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/\_?=%&#\-\+!]+\"\,)
'Replace with:'
"url": "\1
-
Click 'Replace All' and Save the file.
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Back to Chrome window with Session Buddy opened, Click on clogwheel icon ("settings") > Click 'Import',
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Click 'Select File', choose the saved Json File, after the conversion. Click 'Save'.
-
You have a new unsuspended saved session on the left panel. Hooray!
- This was really quick and dirty, should work with all thegreatsuspender current versions. if someone want to make the regex better you are welcome :)
- For admins: if links for other software are not appropriate around here, you may feel free to remove them.
@rudolphos - you can try this regex
@deanoemcke I see the Chrome store says that the current version is: 7.0.109 from August 25, 2018, but I'm still stuck on v6.30 I'm itching to upgrade, but don't want to screw things up. I've tried clicking Chrome's update button in the extensions but it doesn't seem to do anything unfortunately :\
@ctsstc A new version is coming very soon and it will update everybody. The current version on the chrome webstore has some known issues so I've halted the rollout.
A few moments ago I was watching a youtube video when suddenly the "The Great Suspender has been updated" tab opened. Instantly all of my suspended tabs were gone, leaving only my unsuspended tabs. I clicked through to the Session Management page to find there were no sessions whatsoever.
- Running Windows 8, Chrome 72.0.3626.121 64-bit.
- I had not changed any settings from their defaults aside from probably selecting the dark theme.
- The console does not show any errors on the session management page.
- I did not receive any form of warning before the update, it was instantaneous.
- Session had somewhere between 50 to 100 tabs spanning multiple months. History not an option to recover from. I might be able to recover some via the Last Tabs file in Chrome's profile folder later.
Maybe you should just create a sister extension that monitors that the first is maintaining sessions properly.... eliminate the single point of failure.
got the newest update and it seemed fine, but then chrome crashed a few minutes later and when I tried recover session is came back with like 1/10 of the tabs I had, then checking session buddy and it was overwritten to 2 weeks ago -_-
@a5m0 what do you see within the session management section of the great suspender? it should have saved a session with all your open tabs pre-update.
sorry about session buddy. it seems that they stopped doing automatic session saves quite a while ago. there's a thread about better alternatives: #742
@deanoemcke the session management page is empty for all 3 session types, thank you for the session buddy alternative suggestion
I also lost almost all of my suspended pages, and the session management doesn't have any sessions at all. I suppose I'll go through the last several months of history trying to restore everything I lost...
I notice on my windows machine the session management page has lots of sessions listed, my linux machine is all blank and is the one that lost sessions.
The Great Suspender: v7.1.0
- Browser: Chrome Version 73.0.3683.75 (Official Build) (64-bit)
- Operating system: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
A lot of tabs just got closed!
Session Management shows absolutely nothing! All the tabs seem to be permanently gone.
I also need to disable automatic updates and there is apparently no way to do that.
I would have to necessarily stop using this extension if it is responsible for the problem.
It sounds like linux could be a common thread here? I'll do some investigation.
And very sorry for all of you who are suffering from lost tabs :(
I'm on Windows 8 and also have no sessions. It's even a few days later and I look to see no sessions are saving.
I'm on Windows 8 and also have no sessions. It's even a few days later and I look to see no sessions are saving.
Actually, I was just going to come and comment that it's strange: Chrome programming should be independent of the underlying OS, no?! Why would it behave differently on Linux?
@RezaRob I agree. But you do find small differences between the chromium implementations on different operating systems. It's probably grasping at straws though.
@dskrepps Would you mind doing a little bit of debugging for me? That is probably the fastest way to get to the bottom of this. The wiki has instructions on how to enable the debugging log: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/wiki/How-to-enable-the-debugging-log
Once that's turned on, you just need to open and close a tab or two. Normally this would cause the current session to get saved. I suspect that is generating an error which will hopefully be logged to the console.
Is there anyone else on this thread that is having the issue of no current and recent sessions being recorded in the session management view? If so, would anyone like to help with debugging it to see what is going on?
The wiki has instructions on how to enable the debugging log: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/wiki/How-to-enable-the-debugging-log
Once that's turned on, you just need to open and close a tab or two. Normally this would cause the current session to get saved. I suspect that is generating an error which will hopefully be logged to the console.
Debug log attached.
I don't see "About" on the left had side of my extensions settings page. See image.
On a different note, it appears like Chrome has gotten much better at handling this sort of memory overload problem at startup. It seems like some form of lazy-load is already being implemented and it's cleaner than before. So, I'm not entirely sure I will need this extension.
@RezaRob You're looking at Chrome's extensions settings page, you want to look at The Great Suspender's own settings page:
Debug log attached:
klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg-1553179795481.log
@RezaRob @dskrepps Thanks heaps for this. That's super useful. But still not enough to get to the bottom of it.
Can you try pasting this into your DevTools console, press enter, and then report back with everything it says?
let gsDb = await gsIndexedDb.getDb();
let results = await gsDb
.query(gsIndexedDb.DB_CURRENT_SESSIONS)
.all()
.desc()
.execute();
Also, within DevTools, can you go to the Application tab at the top, then expand IndexedDB on the sidebar. You should see tgs - chrome-extension://... and if you expand that, then gsCurrentSessions. Once you click on this, it should show you a list with one entry which is your current session. Do you have this entry?
Thanks for your help.
Also, @RezaRob, I'm aware of the improvements that chrome has made on startup. It actually starts up better with no suspended tabs than if you do have them (as I need to do extra work to make sure the suspended tabs get the correct favicons - due to the new lazy loading :/ ).
BUT, this doesn't solve the problem of chrome using up a lot of ram once you have opened many tabs. It's only good so long as you dont visit all of those tabs that got restored.
I agree though, it's one less use-case for this extension. Which is actually a good thing. Hopefully one day this extension will not be useful at all :D
@deanoemcke, I really appreciate what you're trying to do. This extension has been a lifesaver for me for a long time, and I'm really grateful for that. I owe you for that.
Regarding excess memory after use, Chrome Task Manager let's you stop high memory consuming processes fairly easily. Then, to restart them, pressing the backward/forward navigation buttons (NOT the reload button!) on the stopped page will do a reload, and gets you back to the same page position that you were reading before. I have a feeling that'll be enough for me.
Moreover, a matter of principle bothers me: even last time that I gave you the bug report, I lost several pages. I don't want to run an extension which could easily threaten my browser/work state upon an automatic update which is completely out of my control. This should be fully tested before I have to do the debugging on my end. One option would be a virtual "linux" machine to do the test. In any case, like I said, a Chrome extension should be platform independent, and I still don't understand why it wouldn't be.
Years ago, I had this discussion with the Chromium Dev folks (I think) on their forums, and I begged them to put these features into the official release because I knew problems like this would arise. Now Chrome has gotten better with these memory/startup issues apparently, but perhaps it still needs some more memory management features (after startup.)
We already have a Session Manager extension which appears fairly simple and light weight, and seems to work well. I'm not sure where it stores the session info, but something like this, I suppose, shouldn't be too difficult to do: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-manager/bbcnbpafconjjigibnhbfmmgdbbkcjfi
What is the safe way to remove the extension?
If you want to uninstall the extension, please unsuspend all tabs before doing so. This is the only way to prevent those tabs from disappearing. This can be done easily by clicking the 'Unsuspend all tabs' option in the extension popup menu. Or more manually by visiting every suspended tab and manually reloading it.
Please note that if using the 'Unsuspend all tabs' option, you will need to do this once for each chrome window you have open.
FWIW I was able to set and use the extension's 'Unsuspend all tabs in all windows' hotkey to accomplish this. It was MUCH easier than manually going to each window and doing it. I was on version 6.30.
I just lost all of my suspended tabs (some from months ago) and can't seem to get any of them back. The extension suddenly got disabled and Chrome said that it needed new right or something? Session management doesn't show anything and now I'm a bit lost..
If you have access to system backups, you may be able to restore old 'recent sessions' from these backups. The recent sessions are stored in an IndexedDB database at Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/ and Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.leveldb/
I found the folders and took a copy of them, but what do I do with them @deanoemcke ?
The blob directory seems to just be a bunch of empty files.
There seems to be a logfile in the leveldb folder called 019280.log. Running strings 019280.log on it reveals I what I assume to be a log of all tabs ever suspended, but thats around ~4500 items, it doesnt seem to be any easy way of finding the set of tabs that I lost?
Running strings 019280.log>tmpfile and then opening it in Vim (vim tmpfile) and starting at the bottom I'm able to manually recover the tabs I've that only got suspended a few days ago. But the ones who've been there longer I imagine will either take me a long time or I'll have to give up.
Just lost all of my suspended tabs, because this updated without asking. Session management is empty, they don't show as closed in my Chrome history. This is completely ridiculous and I'm removing this extension immediately, after using it for years. I'm so angry, this seems like basic usability.
Had the exact same problem. Extension trashed over a hundred tabs with no warning. Thanks for nothing.
Just lost all of my suspended tabs, because this updated without asking.
@slfn-ldkf
There is no way for a Chrome extension to ask before updating. Couldn't you get them back with the session "How to recover lost tabs without The Great Suspender"?
Nope. There is no previous session. It's completely blank.
@jvschiavo Did you see the screenshot I posted? There was nothing there. I had Chrome open but was in conversation and not looking at it. When I looked back, I had a tab saying this had updated, my pinned and active tabs were still open, and everything else was gone. Obviously the first thing I did was check my history and follow the steps suggested. Nope. The tabs only show as closed when they were last suspended, which for some of these will be months back. Really not good enough.
I just lost all of my suspended tabs (some from months ago) and can't seem to get any of them back. The extension suddenly got disabled and Chrome said that it needed new right or something? Session management doesn't show anything and now I'm a bit lost..
If you have access to system backups, you may be able to restore old 'recent sessions' from these backups. The recent sessions are stored in an IndexedDB database at Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/ and Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.leveldb/
I found the folders and took a copy of them, but what do I do with them @deanoemcke ?
The blob directory seems to just be a bunch of empty files.
There seems to be a logfile in the leveldb folder called
019280.log. Runningstrings 019280.logon it reveals I what I assume to be a log of all tabs ever suspended, but thats around ~4500 items, it doesnt seem to be any easy way of finding the set of tabs that I lost?Running
strings 019280.log>tmpfileand then opening it in Vim (vim tmpfile) and starting at the bottom I'm able to manually recover the tabs I've that only got suspended a few days ago. But the ones who've been there longer I imagine will either take me a long time or I'll have to give up.
I'm just trying to figure this out. I also found a log file. I didn't have a blob directory at all! How did you run strings?
It works nicely. Recovered 112 tabs a few minutes ago. Thank you.
Hmmm. That's annoying, today I'm going to clean my extensions, and try it and notice this extension is not what I needed, then uninstall it and now I lost my 20 tabs.
Created a Github account just to say that this was an UTTER lifesaver and saved dozens of tabs that I assumed were lost. Thank you so much!
Evil. 500 tabs lost. Somehow they were taken away from session buddy ability to auto save as it does? I'm just about ready to write my own; I've lost tabs under so many browsers and plugins. This is BABY LEVEL DEVELOPMENT. How is this still a common occurrence after so many years? It is called USER DATA - fools!
"chrome://history" - not true! If you haven't restarted your browser for weeks, then there is no way you'll get those tabs back without many hours of work - days if there are hundreds of tabs.
"I would recommend anyone wanting to remove the extension to first back up their tabs using another extension called "Session buddy". This tool will allow you to back up all your tabs and restore them again at a later date. Please be aware that those tabs suspended at the time the session buddy backup is performed will not have their correct urls. These links will only work as long as The Great Suspender is currently installed on your browser. If you want the real urls in your session buddy backup, then you will need to unsuspend all your tabs first."
Another bogus recommendation. When The Great Suspender is uninstalled. It deletes all your stuff, including recent stuff from Session Buddy.
Any way to recover lost tabs? can we temporary enable the extension?
@tusharvb19 I just installed the previous version and whilst that is successful, the session data appears to be lost.
I just lost all of my suspended tabs (some from months ago) and can't seem to get any of them back. The extension suddenly got disabled and Chrome said that it needed new right or something? Session management doesn't show anything and now I'm a bit lost..
If you have access to system backups, you may be able to restore old 'recent sessions' from these backups. The recent sessions are stored in an IndexedDB database at Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/ and Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.leveldb/
I found the folders and took a copy of them, but what do I do with them @deanoemcke ?
The blob directory seems to just be a bunch of empty files.
There seems to be a logfile in the leveldb folder called019280.log. Runningstrings 019280.logon it reveals I what I assume to be a log of all tabs ever suspended, but thats around ~4500 items, it doesnt seem to be any easy way of finding the set of tabs that I lost?
Runningstrings 019280.log>tmpfileand then opening it in Vim (vim tmpfile) and starting at the bottom I'm able to manually recover the tabs I've that only got suspended a few days ago. But the ones who've been there longer I imagine will either take me a long time or I'll have to give up.I'm just trying to figure this out. I also found a log file. I didn't have a blob directory at all! How did you run strings?
unfortunately, it seems my log files were completely blank after the new update. 0 bytes. surely i can do the same process, but for the saved sessions as well?
Best solution I've seen so far that works (but tedious) is #1263 (comment)
Can we change the name to "the great tab destroyer"?
"The Great Destroyer " got me too. Gonna try this later this evening: https://antimatter15.com/2015/12/recovering-deleted-data-from-leveldb/
May be able to grok out the suspended urls with this method.
I was able to manual recover my lost suspended tabs after Chrome webstore removal of the The Great suspender extension by the following steps:
- in:
C:\Users\__YOUR_USER_NAME__\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob\1\__SOME_NUMBER__i found a file (eg.:26b3) - opened that file in VS Code
- a message appeared: "The file is not displayed in the editor because it is either binary or uses an unsupported text encoding. Do you want to open it anyway?"
- after opening, i searched for
uri=https://followed by"�width"and those were the lost suspended links
I had over two hundreds of important tabs ..wtf, how can I recover it, chrome just auto removed the great malware.
#1304 (comment)
this method worked perfectly !!!!!!! i export all my tabs through this method !!! try it
I was trying to move my saved sessions from the "malware" version of TGS to the "marvellous suspender" (should work for the "pre-malware" 7.1.6 version too) and this method worked for me:
- install the marvellous suspender (or 7.1.6 TGS)
- close chrome, then reopen it
- when chrome launches i have about 1 minute of time while the "malware" TGS version still works and chrome does not disable it (may be you will need to turn it on in the app settings), so open the TGS settings and EXPORT your sessions before the chrome disables
- turn off the "malware" TGS, turn on the new suspender app (marvellous suspender or 7.1.6) and import your exported sessions
Another alternative, backup history database and then export it. Basically combine
-
https://superuser.com/a/602274
cd "%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default"
copy History c:\tmp\chrome_history.sqlite3
cd c:\tmp
sqlite3 chrome_history.sqlite3
Issue>
.headers on
.mode csv
.output my-history.csv
SELECT datetime(last_visit_time/1000000-11644473600,'unixepoch','localtime'), url FROM urls where url like 'chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html%' ORDER BY last_visit_time DESC;
I don't want to use this malware anymore, what is an alternative extension and I can import the TGS saved sessions, any idea?
This malware should be sued in the court!
so... who actually is mantaining this project now?
The successor project can be found at https://github.com/gioxx/MarvellousSuspender
I have heard they have assigned a new maintainer so that the original maintainer won't take the blame, I guess they knew what they were doing.
Another alternative, backup history database and then export it. Basically combine
- #1263 (comment)
- https://superuser.com/a/602274
cd "%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default"
copy History c:\tmp\chrome_history.sqlite3
cd c:\tmp
sqlite3 chrome_history.sqlite3Issue>
.headers on .mode csv .output my-history.csv SELECT datetime(last_visit_time/1000000-11644473600,'unixepoch','localtime'), url FROM urls where url like 'chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html%' ORDER BY last_visit_time DESC;
Following up on @clach04's helpful snippet and as I'm going through the process of recovery: You can run the following on the resulting CSV file to get a list of the URLs/URIs.
grep klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg my-history.csv |grep -Eo "uri=(.+)" |cut -d = -f 2 >recovered_tabs.txt
There are numerous other ways to achieve the same thing using awk, sed, etc. – this one works for me. YMMV – depending on your platform.
Once you have the file, you can check this SO post for running through that file and open all those links. Just be mindful of not trying to open too many at once since you'll probably bring Chrome and your system to its knees – which would be the very reason you've been using the extension.
For me this way worked:
- started chrome
- in case some windows with supended tabs seem missing: Ctrl+Shift+T (Windows+Linux, dunno on Mac..) multiple times to reopen previously closed windows/tabs
- select every supsended tab and do a history back ("<-" arrow on the left of the url input field, ALT+(left arrow key) or Mouse Button 4 or 5); will load the actual suspended url
- installed "The Marvellous Suspender" from chrome store
- use it as before..
EDIT: Does not work for all tabs in my case.. :|
This extension is removed from google it been found to contain found malware by the abuse team. google page for the extension shows a 404 error.
I was able to manual recover my lost suspended tabs after Chrome webstore removal of the The Great suspender extension by the following steps:
- in:
C:\Users\__YOUR_USER_NAME__\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob\1\__SOME_NUMBER__i found a file (eg.:26b3)- opened that file in VS Code
- a message appeared: "The file is not displayed in the editor because it is either binary or uses an unsupported text encoding. Do you want to open it anyway?"
- after opening, i searched for
uri=https://followed by"�width"and those were the lost suspended links
Thanks, this worked great!
I used your solution and wrote this Ruby script to export the most recently saved tab URLs to a JSON file:
MAKE A BACKUP OF THE FILES FIRST!
require 'json'
file = Dir['chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/**/*']
.find_all { |f| File.file?(f) } # skip folders, only check actual files
.max_by { |f| File.mtime(f) } # get the most recently modified file
res = {}
read = File.read(file)
read.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")
regex = /uri=(https?\:\/\/.+?)\"\x05width/n
result = read.scan(regex)
res[file] = result.flatten
IO.write('result.json', JSON.pretty_generate(res))
Can confirm, method recommended by @GarlicAAZ works perfectly and doesn't require going through your entire history.
Just a couple of things:
- If you are installing version 7.1.6, load it from source as unpacked extension using Chrome's developer mode. This is an important step, because loading an unpacked extension creates a new unique ID that would not be banned by Google.
- Disable your internet connection to give yourself more time.
To summarize, the sequence should be the following:
- disable internet connection
- restart chrome
- enable TGS (whatever "bad" version you have installed), go to TGS settings, export the most recent session that has about the right number of open tabs
- uninstall "bad" TGS
- enable your internet connection back
- install either 7.1.6 from source or MarvellousSuspender
- import session, then click on "open and suspend" or "open and load". do it only ONCE, as it may seem it's not doing anything at first.
- enjoy all your tabs back!
Any way to recover lost tabs? can we temporary enable the extension?
Here's a way that worked for me to recover the lost tabs:
strings "./Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History" | grep klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg | sed 's/.*uri=//' >~/suspendedurls
The created file suspendedurls will be in time order, most recent last.