After turning on my laptop today, I opened Opera and saw all my tabs from all my workspaces gone. I've experienced crashes like this before, so I copied the session and tab files from the appdata folder and tried replacing the newer files. It didn't work. but the same method does work with some older session back-up files so I suspect the most recent crash corrupted my session file.

I decided to have a look to try and see what I can do about it, but opening any session file just shows nonsense if I use notepad and similar programs.

Here are my questions:

• how can I open the session file in a sensible way, or
• what else I can try to restore my lost session?

Just for context, I also tried:

• copy-pasting older session files (6 months+) into the Sessions folder, which resulted in restoring tabs from that time

• renaming my session file to the newer session's name, and vice-versa

• renaming my session file with the number from the registry ("stable last running")

• opening the session files (with my session and some other for comparison) with notepad, word, notepad++, none of which shows anything readable.

No luck so far.

Would appreciate your help here a lot as I had a ton of important tabs opened there and organised into workspaces, thanks.