Tabs - Session Transfer/Mirror

ag-VH

ag-VH

When reinstalling Opera, I run into the issue of loosing my opened tabs. I know I can synch them but when working with ~300 tabs, the synch feature in it's current form feels insufficient.

only URLs are saved
the order in which the tabs are saved feels completely random
it's not saved in what window the tab was open

The issue: each URL/tab needs to be clicked manually to restore them from synch and then manually sorted into it's window to restore the state I left them in.

It's frustrating having to deal with this every time I install Opera and it makes me consider switching to another browser every time. If another browser offers session transfer (in terms of windows and tabs, not the technical session related to servers/webpages) or even let's me mirror sessions between devices, I might actually leave Opera behind.

I know you guys go hard on innovation and with all of Operas tab management tools and multi-device features, this would surely fit right into the product vision.

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

Not a solution and not discounting your suggestion, but FYI:

In each workspace, in each window, you can right-click on a tab, goto "save" and choose "all tabs to a speed dial folder". Order will be retained. You can then edit the name of that folder to be "Workspace 1 - Window 1", "Workspace 2 - Windows 1", "Workspace 1 - Windows 2" etc. or however you want.

You can even goto the URL opera://bookmarks and move all those folders from the "speed dial" folder to the "other bookmarks" folder if you don't want them to show on the start page.

Then, you can export your bookmarks to an HTML file by using the drop-down at the bottom left of the opera://bookmarks page. Then, in a fresh Opera, you can goto the URL opera://settings/importData, select "Bookmarks HTML file" in the drop-down and point it to the bookmarks HTML file that you exported. Once imported, you should find the imported bookmarks in the "bookmarks bar" folder at the URL opera://bookmarks. You can then move all the imported bookmarks to where you want it. Or, you can sync bookmarks. Synced speed dials will show under "other speed dials" at the URL opera://bookmarks somewhere.

Then, you can recreate your workspaces (or have them automatically recreated if you sync settings) and open up all the windows you need.

Then, in each workspace, in each window, you can right-click its corresponding bookmarks/speed dial folder and choose "open all in tabs" so you don't have to open them one by one.

It's actually pretty fast and easy to do all that once you've done it a few times. It won't retain tab islands though.

There's also another way to do things. You can goto the URL opera://about, take note of the "Profile" path, close Opera and copy the "Sessions" folder to a safe place to back it up. Then, in the new Opera, you can make sure it's closed, delete all the files in its "Sessions" folder and copy all files from your backup "Sessions" folder to the now-empty one for the new Opera. Then when you start that new Opera again, your tabs and windows will be restored. This method will even work with workspaces as long as you create the same number of workspaces in the same order as you had before and close Opera before clearing the "Sessions" folder and copying over from your backup. This way might even work with tab islands to retain them. The downside to this way though is that since the session files are protected a bit, this will probably only work with a new Opera profile created with the same user on the same install of Windows. This probably won't work if you reinstall Windows for example.

Another way to do things is to install Session buddy. You can save a session and it will save the tabs from all windows where you can later restore those windows and their tabs in one shot. You can even export and import. It's not tab-island-aware though. The downside though is that this method doesn't work well with workspaces. You'd have to save an extra session for each workspace you have, which will work, but restoring the session could be funky with using multiple windows.

So, yes. It'd be nice to be able to export/import your session that exported/imported all tabs (in correct order), in all workspaces, in all windows and retained tab islands, and recently-closed tabs and windows. And, maybe even handle split-screen stuff too.

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer @ag-VH

@ag-VH said in Tabs - Session Transfer/Mirror:

The issue: each URL/tab needs to be clicked manually to restore them from synch

There's a workaround for that here to open all the links at once. However, it seems to fail if there are too many links (like your 300 for example).

ag-VH

ag-VH

these are some very good suggestions that I didn't find on my own. Thanks guys!

I will definitely give these a try but as it stands, I still think Opera would benefit from a native function