Probably a loss of about 1000 tabs

Cllaymenn

Cllaymenn

I had almost 1,000 cards open, arranged in different contexts.... and several tabs open in a second Opera window.... Today Opera due to Opera running very slow and taking up more than 45GB in RAM, I wanted to restart it(it always helps) But first I closed the main Opera window and then this second window with several tabs. After reopening what opened? Only a few tabs from the second window!!! and restoring the closed tabs didn't help! (shortcut ctrl+shift+t)

What did Opera do?
Closing as the last one this second window with several tabs. Opera deleted the large Session and Tabs file with my 1000 open tabs and replaced them with tiny files containing those few open tabs in the second window! Opera didn't even back up these 2 files or change the extension to .old
Data recovery programs didn't help, they restored corrupted Session files (maybe you know some software to fix them?)
Session Buddy turned out to have forgotten to do a daily save lately, and the last save was a long time ago!
Opera Sync for this replaced my sync, with a new sync after reopening Opera with a few tabs!

How to return to the previous synchronization with hundreds of my tabs? Does Opera have a backup on the server?

How to restore nicely arranged contexts?

Why doesn't Opera have an option to export, save all sessions from all contexts?

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Cllaymenn

@cllaymenn Well, having 1000 tabs opened is a problem in itself.

Anyway, closed windows can be recovered by going to Menu > History and checking the list of recently closed tabs or by clicking on the tabs menu.

Cllaymenn

Cllaymenn @leocg

@leocg The history in Opera is very simple, it only has a list of open pages from today, yesterday... There is no separate category of closed tabs or windows. In addition, Opera's history has bugs and works badly after a few weeks when the history file is 50mb+. History cannot be used.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @Cllaymenn

@cllaymenn Look at menu > history again. You will see a list of recently closed tabs/windows in the menu.

Also there is the tabs menu in the top right.

Cllaymenn

Cllaymenn @leocg

@leocg So test something like this. But after trying to recover opera from Restore Point, and other operations, this list is empty. I have over 200mb of history saved (Opera can't handle a large history at all and I have to copy the history file to Chrome and it works there without any problem)

Is it possible to recover open tabs from history file?
2 In what file does Opera save this list of recently closed tabs and windows? Maybe I can find it in Opera's backup directory

bigmell

bigmell @Cllaymenn

@cllaymenn

Ahoy!

There used to be an option when you right clicked on the tab bar it said "restore last session." I had a chat with xfinity and the chat window opened an additional small window. I didnt see this and closed the main window while the chat window was still open. When I reopened opera all my tabs were gone and only the chat window was restored. I was able to use "restore last session" or I would have lost all my tabs then.

However I do not see this option anymore as one of these new "updates" seems to have removed this useful option. The "updates" have been removing useful functionality for quite some time now. While adding functionality that doesnt quite work right like tab islands. The only other option I see is every so often right click on the tab bar and "click save all tabs as speed dial folder". You would have to do this every so often so you might lose the most recent tabs but the bulk of them will be on the speed dial. I do it every months or so since this happened.

Of course an opera "update" removed the speed dial almost entirely. But they were kind enough to put it back after over 20 years of use. You know opera invented the speed dial right? Thats why a lot of people use opera in the first place and they decided to remove it? Anyway... The "new" speed dial icon is still very blurry but at least it works again.

The only other option I have seen is to save away the opera tab session file itself. According to the following post

https://forums.opera.com/topic/68959/where-are-opera-tabs-and-tab-groups-stored

I have never tried this myself although I did backup all the files there. Go to the directory path which is
C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Stable\Default

I use Opera Next so I use that path instead of Opera Stable. The files you are looking for are named something like
Session_13348571665369126
Session_13348656000326931
Tabs_13348571665673553
Tabs_13348656002298614

You will want to periodically save those files away in case something happens to your tabs. It keeps a couple sessions as spare so that day your tabs disappeared, theoretically if you went in this directory the previous tab and sessin files would have still been there and you could have erased the new session and reloaded the most recent other session and your tabs would have been restored. I would say look around for session files and if you see a big one like 50kb or so your tabs might still be in there.

Operas stance on the matter seems to be just close them all and to hell with your tabs. Open new ones and only use a couple at a time. But for long time users that plan on using lots of tabs, between saving away the session and tab files, and "save all tabs as speed dial" you might be able to avoid catastrophic loss of all your tabs.

I have a question for admins @leocg These files are unfortunately encrypted and not in plain text? I have no idea why. But it makes it so that you can only manage your tabs through the slow and cumbersome opera gui interface which only shows about 20 tabs at a time. There are some tab managers but they are painfully slow as well. IMO the way to fix this problem would be to make the file with the list of all the tabs a plain Text file. That way this file can simply be edited and tabs can be managed in a way that would be much more convenient and no longer Operas problem other than simply loading them from the file. Much better than "open less tabs and shut up" which seems to have been Operas stance on the matter for the last couple years.

I have been using opera for over 25 years now. A tab seems to be some metadata around a url. I seriously dont understand why a simple plaintext file called "opentabs.txt" with a list of currently opened urls isnt used. Then users would be able to store and modify their tabs at will all using that file. I feel downtrodden upon for having too many tabs open, while the problem seems to be opera currently handles tabs poorly and in a slow and cumbersome manner, as well as partially encrypting what should be a plain text file listing my open tabs. I have 64 gigs of ram, which is more than enough to handle yes many thousands of tabs. My music player handles many thousand songs. My movie player handles many thousand movies. Why does my browser not handle many thousand tabs?

They should simply be loaded from a plain text file that would only be about 100kb large like the current encrypted sessions file. Opera is currently using 3 gigs of ram and I have never seen it use more than about 16 gigs. There should be more than enough space to handle a nearly infinite amount of tabs, and a plaintext file with a listing of tabs and perhaps the page title should be more than sufficient to solve this problem unless it is simply not coded properly.

Alter the file, then right click option "reload tabs from file" and now users can manage their own tabs instead of waiting for Opera to do it. It appears Opera just doesnt want to be bothered with large tab sessions. Their idea "tab islands" was broken upon release and they seem completely uninterested in fixing it.

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer @bigmell

@bigmell Tip: In a forum, you should never reply to an almost one year old topic unless you have the ultimate solution for the problem or having the exactly same problem.

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

Note that the "Retain tabs from previous session" startup option at the URL opera://settings/onStartup can only retain tabs that were still open when you exited Opera. If you have multiple windows open and want to exit Opera, you can't close any windows before you exit Opera or those windows you close won't be retained (because they're not there anymore). You must leave all windows open and click the menu button at the top left of an Opera window and choose "exit".

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

For future reference, to back up your session, you can goto the URL opera://about, take note of the "profile" path, exit Opera and copy the "Sessions" folder in the profile folder to a safe place. Then, if you ever need to restore your session (back to the time you backed it up), while Opera is closed, you can delete all the files in the "Sessions" folder in the profile folder and copy the files in the backup "Sessions" folder to the now-empty "Sessions" folder in the profile folder.

That will work as a backup method for Opera on the same user account with the same user account password on the same install of Windows.

If you want a more-portable way to back up your tabs, in each workspace, you can right-click a tab, goto "save" and choose "all tabs to a speed dial folder". You can then edit that folder and give it a name of the workspace (and the window it was in if you have multiple windows). You can then goto the URL opera://bookmarks and use the drop-down at the bottom left to export your bookmarks as an HTML file.

Then, if you ever need them back, you can goto the URL opera://settings/importData, select "Bookmarks HTML file" in the drop-down and point it to the HTML file. Then, in each workspace, you can right-click on its corresponding speed dial folder and choose "open all in tabs".

The bookmark method as described above won't put tabs back in the islands they were in though, But, note that you can collapse a tab island, right-click its handle and choose to save just its tabs to a folder. There's no right-click on folder -> Create tab island option though. You'd have to use a temp workspace to open those tabs in first, select them, put them in an island and move the island to the workspace you want.

Also note that there are extensions at https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/session for saving and restoring sessions. They're not workspace-aware though. Some of them might be tab-island-aware though.

bigmell

bigmell @leocg

@leocg

you should never reply to an almost one year old topic

I am a career computer scientist and have been actively reading and posting to forums since the mid 90s and I completely disagree that you should "never" reply to an almost one year old topic. Almost one year old is a relatively young topic as I have responded to topics 5-10 years old and ultimately had correspondence with the new people having the exact same problem.

unless you have the ultimate solution for the problem

I also argue that I have indeed posted the ultimate solution for the problem. My solution told the poster how to back up his opera session so that his tabs could be restored in case of catastrophic data loss. I also gave a secondary solution where he could periodically save all his tabs to the speed dial. I have posted not one but two solutions to this problem.

or having the exactly same problem.

I also refer to the part where I said

"I had a chat with xfinity and the chat window opened an additional small window. I didnt see this and closed the main window while the chat window was still open. When I reopened opera all my tabs were gone and only the chat window was restored. I was able to use "restore last session" or I would have lost all my tabs then."

So yes I have also had the exact same problem. Then after all this, you banned me for two days.
"User banned

Sorry, this account has been banned until 6/16/2024, 10:20:48 AM (Reason: Caps lock)"

I realize you are the moderator, but I found this to be completely unreasonable. There were 915 words in my response, and I was banned because I capitalized 5 or 10 of almost 1000 words for emphasis? I think that was a little unreasonable man. I was capitalizing for emphasis and there were really no insults or bad behavior involved.

I have been using Opera daily for over 25 years now and I feel I was just banned for something completely trivial.

johnsamir

johnsamir Banned @Cllaymenn

@cllaymenn It seems Opera closed your second window last, deleting the large Session and Tabs files with 1000 tabs. Unfortunately, Opera doesn't backup these files or change their extension. To return to previous sync and restore contexts, check if Opera has server backups. For future, consider software like Session Buddy for daily saves or request Opera to add an export option for all sessions.

bigmell

bigmell @burnout426

@burnout426
Ahoy burnout!

Aye thanks again man for this post and the other one showing me how to restore from the session file. It was right on time because I was trying another (I better not all cap that for emphasis I might get banned again) tab extension that doesnt seem to work properly.

https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/save-tabs/

This thing started closing down all my tabs while freezing opera every couple seconds. I tried to stop it but every time opera would unfreeze it would close a couple more tabs. I eventually had to ctrl+alt+delete and force close the Opera process. I had recently saved my tab session having read your previous post here

https://forums.opera.com/topic/68959/where-are-opera-tabs-and-tab-groups-stored

One thing to note is that you can not save the current session file while Opera is running. That file is locked somehow and you cant do anything to it. You can only save the previous two session files. One of those files should be an exact copy of the current session so it should be ok. There are normally three there including the current one from what I have seen. I saved away both the Session_ and the Tabs_ files earlier that day.

I restored those files from backup and all the tabs came back but I couldnt see the webpages themselves. It seemed like opera was still partially frozen. I think it was something weird with the previous crash. There was also an opera update waiting. So I launched the update, restarted Opera and then the tabs restored from the backup session. That happened just last night so I can mostly confirm that restoring those session files should work.

So yea go to opera://about and it will give you the path of your opera folder. Go there, then the Default folder, and in the Default folder the Sessions folder. Note that you want the Profile path or the one that says "roaming" in the path, not the one that says "local". On my machine (I use opera next also called opera beta) this path was

C:\Users\ [username] \AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Next\Default\Sessions

I put the Session_ files and the Tabs_ files in a folder named opera.tab.backup.6.20.2024. I also moved that folder into a separate directory in case something goes wrong with opera and it over-writes the directory somehow. I figure if you backup like that periodically you will not have to worry about catastrophic data loss, only the tabs you opened since the last backup, which sucks but is more reasonable than losing everything. So save the session whenever you are doing something important and that seems like it should save you from catastrophic data loss.

Also I see a couple tools that might be able to read the snss session files. It would be really nice if that file was in plain text so that if I wanted to, for example, go through all of my many tabs and pick and choose which to close with checkboxes I could do so. Doing this through the UI tab interface is slow, clunky, and difficult. I would like a page where I can scroll through a long list of my tabs and see the title of the page, the URL, and an optional screenshot of the webpage itself. And from there I can click a checkbox and close multiple tabs at once instead of one by one. I wouldnt mind that on the speed dial under the news. Most other solutions only give the option to close all tabs or leave them all open which is why there tends to be so many open. There is no reasonable way to directly manage this.

The best solution I have found otherwise is the Easy Tab Manager extension located here.

https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/easy-tab-manager/

It shows the entire list of tabs by name, you can hold control and click on multiple tabs you want to close, and then close maybe 5-10 at once instead of painfully scrolling around and closing them one by one. However if you try to close a lot like 20-50 at a time it might freeze on you and just not close anything.

Yea I think its kind of unreasonable that the official stance on tab management is "just close all those tabs and shut up." While the developers spend a huge amount of time rounding off all the corners, and with the recent update putting emoji's on the top of every tab wtf? Tab islands were a decent idea, but never worked right and scrolled your tab list around automatically making you lose your current tab position. Which is a big problem when you have a lot of tabs open. "Ctrl ~" will go back to the previous tab, but sometimes you need more functionality than this.

Not perfect, but at least now you can avoid catastrophic data loss.

Good luck!