Tabs Vanished: How to Restore?

[Clueless in Seattle]

Firefox 107.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10 21H2, Refurbished Dell Latitude 3330 laptop

This morning when I booted up my antique refurbished laptop and ran Firefox, I was disconcerted to see my tab bar completley empty.

I looked in the History menu and found a "Recently Closed Tabs" item, but it was grayed out and unresponsive.

Then under Tools I found the "Sync Now" button and impulsively clicked it, hoping it would restore my tabs. It only crossed my mind after I had already clicked it that that button probably copies my current empty tab bar to the back-up site, so I suspect that in my impulsiveness I had just shot myself in the foot.

I didn't give up, however, and I did end up finding a web page* with instructions for restoring vanished tabs from a folder named sessionstore-backups folder. I found that folder on my laptop, and it contains a file named previous.jsonlz4 with yesterday's date (12/04/22).

The instructions say that "You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file." But when I search my profile folder for sessionstore.jsonlz4 with Windows 10 File Explorer I get this error: "No items match your search."

Should I be looking in some other folder? Or have I misread the instructions?

*(Here's the URL where I found the instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1261665

[therube]

Before doing below, I would make a backup of your Profile Folder.
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder

---

sessionstore.jsonlz4 only exists, is only expected to only exist, when FF is closed.

So Quit FF
Copy your previous.jsonlz4 overtop your ("empty") sessionstore.jsonlz4
Start FF

And see if that contains your wanted data.

---

I may be off on this, but no telling what FF may or may not do upon opening an "old" Profile.
So, perhaps ?, it opened a new Profile, instead, & your old Profile is sitting - somewhere else (like maybe, on your desktop)?

You could do a search for "places.sqlite" & see where it turns up & that might help clue you in - if this might be the issue.

[Clueless in Seattle]

Thanks for that speedy response, therube!

I'm guessing that I should close Firefox before making a back-up copy of the profile folder. Am I guessing right?

[therube]

Actually, I'd do a before closing & after closing.

[Clueless in Seattle]

Hi again, therube!

I tried renaming that older previous.jsonlz4 to sessionstore.jsonlz4 and then pasting it into my FF profile. But when I ran FF the tab bar was still empty. So I've decided to throw in the towel and just rebuild my tab bar from scratch. My bookmarks toolbar was not affected by the loss of the tabs, so I have a way to find again most all of those web sites that I had tabbed for quick access.

One of the articles I read while searching for a solution to the problem of vanishing tabs said that losing tabs is actually a rather common problem in Firefox. So from now on I'll try to get into the habit of relying on my Bookmarks toolbar instead of the tabs bar.

Thanks again for helping me work through this problem.