+3
Fixed

Lost all hibernated tabs and folders on reboot

Steve Ancona 11 years ago updated by Joel Thornton 11 years ago 4

On restarting Chrome I found that all of my hibernated folder branches and saved sessions were wiped out...


I shut down the browser normally, and did not see any errors. On restart I was greeted by a completely clean browser and sidewise bar.

Answer

Answer
Fixed

The hotfix for this is now up. As I am unable to reproduce the problem here I can't be sure that the actual cause has been fixed, but I've done everything I can think of to avoid and/or recover from this type of problem in future.


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My sincere apologies. I am also going to try to release a 'hotfix' to specifically address this issue ASAP.

Started

My sincere apologies. I am also going to try to release a 'hotfix' to specifically address this issue ASAP.

Do you use Chrome's "Continue where I left off" setting, or one of the other two?

+2

Unfortunately the only way I can suggest for recovering what you already lost is to recover the following folder from a local system backup, if you can:


  C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome


If you have such a backup from before "the incident", recovering that folder then restarting Chrome should bring the data back.


I am testing the hotfix now, which includes several changes to hopefully prevent this from happening ever again. 


Although I cannot reproduce the issue here, the most likely cause is that Chrome sometimes fails to notify Sidewise about it shutting down, or takes a long time to do so. This could lead Sidewise to erroneously remove window(s) from the tree, thinking that the user manually closed a specific window and wanted it removed from the tree. Sidewise then saves this updated tree before Chrome finishes shutting down, so the tree turns up empty on restart.


That being said, I'm trying multiple overlapping strategies for addressing the emptied-tree issue in the hotfix:


  • Increase wait time after closing a tab or window before allowing Sidewise to save the tree: this should directly counteract the "slow shutdown" case described above
  • Never save the page tree to disk when it is currently empty
  • Try harder to check for whether Chrome is shutting down before allowing saving of the page tree
  • Automatically save an internal backup of the page tree every 15 minutes; if the page tree somehow comes up empty on restart and a backup exists, it will be automatically restored
  • Add a "Recover tree from backup" button in Options->Advanced to manually restore the tree to the last internal backup saved during the *previous* Chrome session
Again, my apologies for this issue. I should have the hotfix out within 24 hours, and I hope these changes will prevent this issue going forward. 

+1

The hotfix is now completed and I will most likely release it tomorrow as long as I don't find any other issues or new causes of the tree-emptying issue.


One last note - the next major release which I have been hammering on for the past month adds a "Recently closed" sidebar pane, so that will provide one more disaster-recovery mechanism for Sidewise when it's released.


Thanks for the report.

Answer
Fixed

The hotfix for this is now up. As I am unable to reproduce the problem here I can't be sure that the actual cause has been fixed, but I've done everything I can think of to avoid and/or recover from this type of problem in future.


---


My sincere apologies. I am also going to try to release a 'hotfix' to specifically address this issue ASAP.

My tree was wiped, after restart still nothing, so i pressed emergency backup, then got just my current tabs, and not all the hibernating ones


Is there a backup folder / files I can use to try different date/times for rescuing my MANY hibernating tabs ? (on MAC)