Session file not working
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Vivaldi has been fantastic for me… until now. Yesterday I saved a session. A couple of hours later, I had a CPU failure and the PC powered off. I fixed what was causing it (fortunately the CPU wasn’t damaged, it was an emergency shutdown due to a faulty radiator), so there’s no problem here. I wan’t surprised that Vivaldi lost the session I was at when the shutdown happened. What I AM surprised is that it’s unable to load the session file I saved earlier. File –> Open saved session –> Ok and… nothing. I hoped that maybe I could recover the tabs by hand, from viewing the file’s contents but it’s binary, so no luck here. Help?
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chkdsk /f c:
the shutdown can cause also bad disk writes, the session file can be lost in a bad sector.
Some text (both as plain 8bit ascii and 16bit unicode) is clearly visible in Sessions*.bin files, at least the urls of the opened sites in that session should be retrieved with at least an hexeditor. If really no valid url can be seen, then the session file is badly damaged. -
Chkdsk is running, though the session was saved a couple of hours BEFORE the shutdown so I’m a bit doubtful a bad sector could be the cause.
In the meantime I took a look at the file in a hex editor – and no wonder it didn’t load. It has no data, 100% of zeroes. Now I wonder whether it’s a bad sector (will find out soon enough) or some other bug – Vivaldi was behaving strangely with that session for a couple of days, but I couldn‘t find the time to pinpoint the reason. It seemed to be forgetting changes in the current session and on restart go back to its state from a couple days earlier. It also sometimes refused to bring back the last session after closing the window – and it was available for recovery in the closed tab/windows feature.
This means though that I have most of those tabs in my recent history, so beside additional work I probably won’t lose any data.
I also did a test session save right now and this one seemed to work fine. I hope it will stay that way.
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