What are chunky pages?

Is there any way to retrieve Firefox's memory of what pages were open before a *previous* crash?

• If you use Firefox and the browser crashes, when you reopen it it asks you if you want to open the pages you had open before it crashed. At least with the settings I have chosen. However, this does not always work perfectly. If a page has been open but not used -- looked at -- for a very long time, it may just disappear. Or if your computer did not manage to access the "frontmost" tab, somehow Firefox forgets about all tabs in that window. In short, the function which is supposed to reopen your pages does not work perfectly. Actually, I'd say it does not work properly, but hopefully one day it will. These problems seem to be worst if, for some reason, your browser crashes more or less directly again, not giving you time to restore what you had going. And if you, like me, have a gazillion tabs open all the time, going through the history to find out what was open is just not practical. It could be weeks since I opened some tabs, and it is not humanly possible to go through weeks of browser history. There are hundreds of pages only for a single day and it just cannot be done. Anyhow, I think that perhaps it may be possible to access a previous "crash file". If it now shows me only a few of those pages and tabs I had open, perhaps there is somewhere a file with the previous "crash memory" that I could locate and use for opening the files Firefox has now forgotten about? If so, using a Mac with Mountain Lion -- where do I find such an older "crash file"?

• Answer:

  Last week my house had some electrical issues, and my computer got turned off, this caused Firefox to lose all my opened tabs i had that time. After a bit of poking around and Googling, I found the profile data is stored in the appdata folder (%APPDATA%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[RandomNumber]) on Windows (you may or may not have the “Roaming” folder). If you’re a Mac user, you should find the profile data at ~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ or ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/. The files you’ll be looking for is sessionstore.js and sessionstore.bak. Firefox automatically creates a backup encase of crashes, but if like me, you opened and closed Firefox several times before realizing this, you will have overwritten both these files several times. At this point, I almost gave up. I figured the chances of recovering the session data file was pretty low. Having successfully used file-recovery software before, I decided to give it a shot. On Windows I use http://www.piriform.com/recuva, made by the same people as CCleaner, and it’s free. If you’re on a Mac and you don’t have Time Machine or (for whatever reason) don’t have any form of backup enabled, you can have a look at some Mac-based http://alternativeto.net/software/recuva/?platform=mac. I knew what file I was looking for, where it was, and how to recover it. I was lucky enough to find a completely untouched version of my sessions file. After the file was recovered, I moved it to the correct location and re-opened Firefox.