Restore Crashed Session that then opened useless session

Restore Crashed Session that then opened useless session

I had two Opera browsers open. One had many tabs opened as I did stuff for work. The other only had one tab. I'm not sure what happened, but suddenly both browsers shut. When I restarted Opera, it only opened the browser with one tab.

Is there a way to find the other session somewhere? It had a lot of tabs that were days/weeks old since I use Opera for many different tasks and therefore don't get back to a particular tab on the same day.

Thanks!

A backup of a previous session is saved as autosave.win.bak

I don't know when it gets replaced, so first of all find it and copy it elsewhere, along with your cached files.

You'll find a statement showing the folder for the sessions file by opening the Preferences Editor (enter opera:config in the address bar) and searching for sessions. The location is shown in the User Prefs section of the Preferences Editor, against the entry for the Windows Storage File. Navigate to the sessions folder and find autosave.win.bak -- if the filedate predates the crash, copy autosave.win.bak somewhere else, plus the current autosave.win if it's important to you.

Find the cache location, again using the Preferences Editor, going to the User Prefs section and then the entry marked Cache Directory4. Navigate to the cache folder and copy the contents elsewhere, if they are old enough. This is insurance for you, especially if autosave.win.bak is too recent to be any help.

Now you can rename autosave.win.bak to autosave.win in the sessions folder. If it's old enough, your lost session should open up.

If autosave.win.bak isn't old enough but the cached files are, go to http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/opera_cache_view.html for a freeware cache viewer suitable for Opera 10.5+ (if you're using an older version, let me know). The cache viewer should allow you to retrace your browsing history and save the content. There's also Opera's own History you could look at. I've used XnView (freeware for personal use) when I've wanted to explore the image content of Opera's cache.

Hope that helps. The session files are small and it's well worth getting into the habit of saving your sessions.

Thank you so very much! You were absolutely amazing and thorough in your help.

*sparkles*

I no longer allow opera to open the previous session from autosave.win, always renaming it before opening opera after a crash. Call me a packrat. I have session files from numerous installations dating back five years. I keep my sessions organized by using a date format like:

20100608-crash.win
20100608-news.win
20100608-3 windows 176 tabs of crap.win

Too many times opera has only opened one window from a multi window session, overwriting autosave.win. Seems that more often than not the window I wanted back the most was the one lost forever. Even if a session file is corrupt, I'll still keep it. I can still search it with a text editor. Sometimes I am able find something thought to be lost by searching within all the files in the session folder for a specific character string.