How to restore Brave session manually?

Question

I have a full session file with correct looking information called session-store-1 but Brave just produces my pinned tab and an empty tab. There are no other session-store files. Maybe this one has gotten too big as it's 831KB.

I'm willing to manually restore my tabs, but cannot find the tabs that where active from the file. How can I do that? What's the pattern there?

Solution

This is a known problem, currently open here :
Brave should restore session gracefully after a crash #5512.

In another Community post about the same problem, this answer was given by the developer named Clifton who was assigned to the problem:

I apologies for the problems you’ve had. In the case of a crash, we are aware of how the window session data can be lost (open tabs, etc). We have an issue here that you can track which has tasks we need to do to improve the reliability:

https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/55128

In the meantime, if you are opening a lot of windows instead of bookmarking… you can save your session every so-often. The file will be located at ~/Library/Application Support/brave/session-store-1. I back up this file maybe once a week (you can automate that with cron). Obviously this is not ideal and we want to fix it properly- it’ll just take a while to get there (specific details captured in the above issue).

Thanks for hanging in there so far.

So keep tracking the above issue - you will see there when/if the problem was fixed. If you cannot accept this problem, your only choice is to use another browser in the meantime.

Comments

[MrFox]

Thanks but that doesn't solve my issue. Is there a way to manually restore the session from the saved file? I have the file but can't restore my session. I'm willing to go in with Notepad++ and copy-paste the urls, but I can't find them in there. I was already using two other browsers simultaneously and will keep doing so.

[harrymc]

The file session-store-1 is not always usable, which is why Clifton recommends saving it regularly and returning it from backup if it is destroyed. Sometimes one can find the sessions in another file named session-store-2 (or other) that has to be renamed to session-store-1 to be used. It seems like session-saving in Brave is very buggy at the moment. If the developer in question, Clifton, has no solution for himself for restoring a destroyed session-store-1 except returning it from backup, then I'm afraid that no one can help.

[MrFox]

Just to make sure you understand; the file looks like it has perfect JSON structure. Not like it has been corrupted or anything like that. It just has many thousands of line and I cannot find my urls in the structure.

[harrymc]

I didn't say it was corrupted, just that it was unusable for restoring the sessions.

[G_V]

I really wish I knew this before I lost months of work because of it. Is this going to interfere with Crypto wallets too? If so, Brave has just become too dangerous to use. It crashes too often, leaks memory, and apparently just randomly nukes your entire tabs history unless you use some hidden save function somehow.

[MrFox]

Sometimes doesn't exist at all or is located elsewhere: Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\brave or Users\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware