767440 - Session (all tabs and tab groups) is lost upon upgrade and crash of Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1003300

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[mozilla]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Build ID: 20120614114901

Steps to reproduce:

I have used Firefox and accumulated over 100 tabs utilizing tab groups to group them. I had only one Window. When Firefox was trying to close, two plugin containers were not closing down, so I force closed them. After waiting for quite a while, the main Firefox application still did not close down, so I force closed it as well. After that I started Firefox again.


Actual results:

Firefox went through the upgrade process and upgraded to version 13.0.1. When Firefox opened, all the tabs were gone and it opened a brand new tab welcoming to new Firefox. I quickly looked up about the session and found out that there is a backup copy, so I saved that. If I would not have saved the backup copy on time and restarted Firefox, I could have lost everything. After closing Firefox and renaming the backup session file to a regular file name multiple times, Firefox did not even offer to restore my previous session, it was opening the same one tab. Then I manually looked through the session file and saw that "window" did not have any entries, but "_closed_window" has all of my tab information. So I manipulated the file by swapping the names between window and closed window. Started Firefox and regained my tabs (I also noticed that for some reason Firefox opened two other windows with one tab in each with some site that I visited a long time ago).


Expected results:

I expected Firefox to recover my old session and bring up all my tabs. I would prefer that Firefox retains multiple session backups, with control by the user on how many and their retention period. I normally used TabMixPlus for session management and it gave me that feature, but I wanted to use Firefox' "don't load tabs until selected" feature.

Comment 1

[mozilla]

Correction for the entries from the session file: it should be "windows" and "_closedWindows" instead of "window" and "_closed_window".

Comment 2

[Jason Spiro]

Related:

Bug 558425 - Make backups of sessionstore.bak

Comment 3

[Eugen Paraschiv]

This is a real issue which keeps occurring - a crash simply looses all tabs in tab groups - any news on a fix. 
Thanks. 
Eugen.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I suspect reporter is gone.
Eugen, do you still see this problem?

Comment 5

[Eugen Paraschiv]

While I don't know if this has been fixed in v29 - I have seen this happen in previous versions from time to time - at least once in v27 or 28. What happenes is - in case the process hangs and I terminate it from the task manager (or in Linux, command line) - next time I start Firefox, I no longer have my opened tabs (nor my pinned tabs) - everything is reset to just my homepage. 
I'm assuming that the mechanism that is storing the tabs is not as robust as it needs to be - has this been addressed in one of the latest releases?
Cheers, 
Eugen.

Comment 6

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Let's dupe this to bug 1003300 where I requested some more investigation around this issue.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 1003300 was just closed. So if anyone has seen this problem in past year, now is a good time to comment