Tabiary

How to recover tabs after a Chrome update or crash

Chrome restarted after an update, a crash or a forced reboot and came back with a single blank tab. Your windows are very often still recoverable, but some of the methods only work until you close Chrome again. Start at the top.

Important: do not close Chrome and reopen it "to see if they come back". Chrome only remembers the last couple of sessions, and each restart pushes the one you want further out.

1. Reopen closed windows with the keyboard

Press Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac). Right after a restart, the first press usually reopens the entire previous window with all its tabs. Keep pressing to bring back earlier windows.

2. Use the "Recently closed" list

Open the three-dot menu, then History. Under "Recently closed" look for entries such as "12 tabs" or a window with a tab count, and click it to restore the whole set, tab groups included.

3. Check tabs on your other devices

If Chrome sync is on, open chrome://history/syncedTabs. Tabs that were open on this or another device at the last sync are listed there and can be reopened one by one.

4. Look for saved tab groups

Tab groups you had saved appear at the left of the bookmarks bar and under the three-dot menu, in "Tab groups". They survive restarts independently of the session.

5. Rebuild from history

Open chrome://history. Use "Grouped by" or the search box to find pages by site or topic from before the update. It is slower, but nothing is lost here for about 90 days.

6. Restore the session files (advanced)

Chrome stores open windows in a Sessions folder inside your profile, in files whose names begin with Session_ and Tabs_. Each start writes new ones and keeps only the most recent few.

SystemChrome profile folder
Windows%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
macOS~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default
Linux~/.config/google-chrome/Default

If you use several Chrome profiles the folder is called Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on instead of Default. Open chrome://version and read the "Profile Path" line to be sure.

  1. Quit Chrome completely and copy the whole Sessions folder somewhere safe.
  2. If your computer keeps backups (Windows "Previous versions" or File History, macOS Time Machine), restore the Sessions folder from a time before the update.
  3. Without a backup: inside Sessions, sort by date. If there are older Session_ and Tabs_ files next to the newest pair, move the newest pair out of the folder so Chrome falls back to the older one.
  4. Start Chrome and press Ctrl+Shift+T.

This does not always work, because the files are in an internal format that changes between Chrome versions. With your copy of the folder you can always put things back.

Make it less likely next time