Solved Exporting & Importing Sessions

mib2berlin

@havivman
Hi, during my tests with copy the Session folder I don`t overwrite but wipe/rename the destination folder.
I got an exact copy but I don't use tab names and you loose the existing tabs.

Cheers, mib

havivman

@mib2berlin

Cool. Good to hear that your repro was similar to mine. I definitely think that Option #1 is the best / easiest route for most people.

And thanks again for your earlier idea to try the Session File Surgery idea.

Also, as I am weed whacking Tabs, I am noticing that Workspaces start to get hairy around 2K Tabs. But they seem to be working better with smaller sets. So I am going to try moving Tabs from Workspaces with too many Tabs to a seperate Workspace that is better trimmed down.

Finally, I will say, despite all of that, Vivaldi actually performs very admirably for general usage way, way North of 4K Tabs. Where it starts having issues is when you start trying to Bulk Close Tabs say 12+ at a time in a Workspace that is close to 2K Tabs. But again, I get that this use case is atypical and not being tested to.

I realize that my use case is more of an interesting stress test case (lol, I was actually above 7K Tabs) so I will add more observations as I have them in case they are helpful to the Devs.

mib2berlin

@havivman
Ha, I stop at 2300 tabs to test a bug, hover over the Help Menu crash Vivaldi, all background tabs are hibernated
There was a border around 800 tabs I could reproduce this, 1000 for example but I could never crash Vivaldi with lower than 800 tabs.
This was on my Ryzen 7 system with 16 GB Ram.
Do you use the new tab setting Memory Saver?

havivman

@mib2berlin

Yep.

Config:
Memory Saver = enabled
Type = Automatic

mallen

As you guys seem to be trying to do something similar to me I'll post my question here.

Anyone worked out where the Workspace names are stored?

I have a problem with a crashing browser. While trying to diagnose it I am trying to find minimal way of transferring my session of 600 tabs to a fresh install.

I have 60 workspaces. When I move just "session" and "session storage" folders I get all my tabs back, but no workspace names.

mib2berlin

@mallen
Hi, the workspace names are in the \Sessions\sessions.json file:

Did you delete the existing folders before you copy your folders over?

mallen

Thanks @mib2berlin , I'll try it again.

I had deleted (renamed) both the "session" and "session storage" folders. Maybe something got upset as I was also swapping from 32-bit to 64-bit editions at the same time.

All the tabs restored, but all the workspaces were "Restored Workspace".

mib2berlin

@mallen
Hm, I tested this again and get "Restored Workspaces" as name.
The workspace names are stored in another file too but I have no idea where.

mallen

@mib2berlin said in Exporting & Importing Sessions:

The workspace names are stored in another file too but I have no idea where.

I tried a text search through the whole userdata folder and only place I could find the names were in session.json.

I guess those session ID numbers are stored somewhere. I even tried copying "preferences" across after I read something.

It is frustrating to be so close but so far from a simple solution. I was try avoiding having to backup the whole user-data folder each time.

mallen

So I then opened one of the saved sessions... get a new Vivaldi Window open. Now 60 workspaces called "Restore Workspace" and 60 with the correct names... which I supposed gets me somewhere. Now just need to delete the sixty workspaces with the "Restore Workspace" in the name.

~~Maybe someone knows how to make a totally empty Vivaldi I can then restore a backup session into? I don't get why we can't just open a session and REPLACE the current session and all workspaces.~~

~~I thought - maybe use the WINDOWS panel to select the 60 workspaces and delete them with one press of DEL.... nope.~~

Tried to edit sessions.json to remove the dups? And that didn't work as the names in sessions.json don't seem connected with the Workspaces. More to do with backups. There no unknown \ restore workspaces. The current session must be in one of those other files.

I'm stubborn... I'll find something. Manually deleted Tabs_nnnnnn and Session_nnnnn from the folder. This gave me NO tabs as I started, but still had 120 empty workspaces. Attempted to delete all of those one by one (a headache as each needed a confirmation). Tried to restore an old backup session... but not sure what happened as that was half names and half Restored Workspace. (Which could just be the backup).

~~I don't understand why we have an ability to restore a session but not delete the current session so as not to duplicate everything...~~

-=-=-=-=-

OKAY - some Success!!

A fresh install of Vivaldi. Fire it up, let it initialise, then close it.

Go to my old backup and replace the session folder, session storage folder and preferences file.

THAT worked. With named workspaces. (Not sure what I did wrong earlier - guess it was making sure I have a matching preferences file)

Just need to focus on a few other files like bookmarks and I'll have a backup/restore cut down to just a few files.

havivman

@mallen

While I obviously can't speak to your whole process, I don't think you did anything wrong earlier. I basically did the same process you did before which was to copy the Sessions Folder from the Source to the Destination Profile while deleting / renaming the original Sessions Folders on the Destination PC. So from the sounds of it we did the same process. And when I did that, I got the exact same results you did.

Successfully Migrated

All of my Tabs migrated fine
All of my Tabs to Workspace mappings migrated fine
All of my my Tabs to Tab Stack mappings migrated fine.

Migration Fails

Workspace Names all lost
Tab Stack Names all lost

Great to hear your newer process seemed to fix that problem though so I may need to give that a spin.

mallen

I should probably delete all the other waffle.

The key to getting the Workspace names is with the Preferences file. Which I assume also has the bonus of bringing over other settings as well from another machine.

This was on Windows and likely works on other OS with a small tweak

%LocalAppData%\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Sessions\ folder
%LocalAppData%\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Session Storage\ folder
%LocalAppData%\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Preferences file

%LocalAppData% expands to your normal user folder. i.e. C:\Users\mallen\AppData\Local\ in this example.

mib2berlin

@mallen
Hi, I tried to check where the workspace information is in the Preference file but could not find it.
If you change to a new system or something it is OK to copy the file but if you have a broken profile and have to reset it is not good to copy the whole file over.
Do you know in which section of the Preference file the workspace naming information is?

Cheers, mib

mallen

@mib2berlin said in Exporting & Importing Sessions:

Do you know in which section of the Preference file the workspace naming information is?

No idea. I just found it was the key file that was needed. For my mate who is having problems getting his preferences into a new install is useful to him.

Some Decoding of Preferences

Looking at the raw text in that file now I see "Workspaces" appear once. I get some of the wall of numbers that follows makes it work. As I read onwards from that word I see the titles of my sessions.

"workspaces":{"button":{"show_name":true},"link_routes":[],"list":[{"icon":"\u003Csvg width=\"16\" height=\"16\" viewBox=\"0 0 16 16\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"currentColor\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\">\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M11.5 10.75C11.5 10.75 15.5 8.00001 15.5 5.75001C15.5024 5.28342 15.3591 4.82771 15.0901 4.44646C14.8211 4.06522 14.4398 3.77745 13.9994 3.62331C13.559 3.46917 13.0814 3.45634 12.6334 3.58661C12.1853 3.71688 11.7891 3.98376 11.5 4.35001C11.2109 3.98376 10.8147 3.71688 10.3667 3.58661C9.91863 3.45634 9.44109 3.46917 9.00068 3.62331C8.56028 3.77745 8.17897 4.06522 7.90995 4.44646C7.64094 4.82771 7.49763 5.28342 7.50003 5.75001C7.50003 8.00001 11.5 10.75 11.5 10.75Z\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M11.5 10.753C11.0645 11.1891 10.8199 11.7802 10.8199 12.3965C10.8199 13.0128 11.0645 13.6039 11.5 14.04C11.8899 14.4307 12.1253 14.9493 12.163 15.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M5.85599 15.5C6.01057 15.0489 6.03574 14.5636 5.92863 14.0989C5.82153 13.6343 5.58644 13.2089 5.24999 12.871C5.01218 12.6333 4.82354 12.351 4.69483 12.0404C4.56612 11.7297 4.49988 11.3968 4.49988 11.0605C4.49988 10.7242 4.56612 10.3913 4.69483 10.0806C4.82354 9.76998 5.01218 9.48773 5.24999 9.25\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M9.385 1.51802C9.13837 1.21327 8.82932 0.964891 8.47866 0.789589C8.12799 0.614287 7.74384 0.516132 7.35207 0.501731C6.96029 0.487329 6.56997 0.557015 6.20738 0.706098C5.84479 0.855181 5.51834 1.0802 5.25 1.36602C4.87267 0.964714 4.38343 0.686071 3.84578 0.566244C3.30813 0.446417 2.74688 0.490937 2.23484 0.694027C1.7228 0.897117 1.28362 1.2494 0.974269 1.70518C0.664919 2.16095 0.499683 2.69918 0.5 3.25002C0.5 6.00002 5.25 9.25002 5.25 9.25002C5.25 9.25002 5.714 8.93202 6.35 8.41102\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n\u003C/svg>\n","id":1.701772910721e+12,"name":"My First Workspace"},{"icon":"\u003Csvg width=\"16\" height=\"16\" viewBox=\"0 0 16 16\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"currentColor\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\">\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M9.5 0.5H6.5V15.5H9.5V0.5Z\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M3.5 10.5H0.5V15.5H3.5V10.5Z\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M15.5 5.5H12.5V15.5H15.5V5.5Z\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n\u003C/svg>\n","id":1.692203254698e+12,"name":"My Second Workspace"},{"icon":"\u003Csvg width=\"16\" height=\"16\" viewBox=\"0 0 16 16\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"currentColor\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\">\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M13.5 3.5H15.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M10.5 6.5H2C1.60218 6.5 1.22064 6.34196 0.93934 6.06066C0.658035 5.77936 0.5 5.39782 0.5 5V2C0.5 1.60218 0.658035 1.22064 0.93934 0.93934C1.22064 0.658035 1.60218 0.5 2 0.5H10.5L13.5 1.5V5.5L10.5 6.5Z\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M7.5 6.5L6.687 10.565C6.63667 10.8169 6.68525 11.0786 6.82266 11.2957C6.96006 11.5128 7.17575 11.6687 7.425 11.731L9.364 12.216C9.68846 12.2972 9.97649 12.4844 10.1823 12.7481C10.3881 13.0117 10.5 13.3365 10.5 13.671V15.5H0.5V13.427C0.499917 13.1484 0.57743 12.8753 0.723853 12.6382C0.870276 12.4012 1.07982 12.2096 1.329 12.085L2.063 11.719C2.19933 11.6507 2.31824 11.5521 2.41062 11.4308C2.503 11.3094 2.56641 11.1686 2.596 11.019L3.5 6.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M10.5 0.5V6.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M2.5 4.5H5.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n  \u003Cpath d=\"M2.5 2.5H5.5\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\"/>\n\u003C/svg>\n","id":1.691848707565e+12,"name":"My Third Workspace"},{"icon":"\u003Csvg ..... and so on until.... ,"id":1.714050266767e+12,"name":"My Last Workspace"}]}},

Above is a snippet of that text. I chopped it after the third Workspace. I renamed the Workspaces to "My First Workspace", etc so it is easier to follow.

In my preferences file I think it ends when "web_apps" appears. No doubt that will be different in every file and looking for the closing } will be the key. (It is actually "name":"My Last Workspace"}]}}, that is the end point... and I have now seen "web_apps" in multiple examples as the item that comes next)

Not used to modern syntax, so no idea what that is. But a bit of careful reading at it is clear this is a list of my workspaces. Each workspace starts with {"icon": and ends with "id":1.714050266767e+12,"name":"My Last Workspace"} so is pretty easy to decode. Or would be if not all in one unreadable line.

Some of the important points here are the values like "id":1.691848707565e+12" as this will line up with the saved sessions. I have seen that number in the session files.

My fairly safe bet is that we could lift that whole chunk starting from "workspaces":{"list" and ending at }]}}, and drop it into another preferences file and it should work.

Further research shows may also need to lift out the item called "sessions" (NOPE - not needed.
See next post)

"sessions":{"event_log":[{"did_schedule_command":true,"first_session_service":true,"tab_count":676,"time":"13358983330617417","type":2,"window_count":1},{"crashed":false,"time":"13358987289117184","type":0},{"restore_browser":true,"synchronous":true,"time":"13358987289189201","type":5},{"errored_reading":false,"tab_count":676,"time":"13358987290032595","type":1,"window_count":1},{"did_schedule_command":true,"first_session_service":true,"tab_count":678,"time":"13358987642813894","type":2,"window_count":1},{"crashed":false,"time":"13359121294720377","type":0},{"restore_browser":true,"synchronous":false,"time":"13359121848355592","type":5},{"errored_reading":false,"tab_count":678,"time":"13359121850469579","type":1,"window_count":1},{"restore_browser":true,"synchronous":false,"time":"13359128141686867","type":5},{"errored_reading":false,"tab_count":676,"time":"13359128143797713","type":1,"window_count":1},{"did_schedule_command":true,"first_session_service":true,"tab_count":676,"time":"13359203951132302","type":2,"window_count":1},{"crashed":true,"time":"13360252129230034","type":0},{"restore_browser":true,"synchronous":true,"time":"13360252129525970","type":5},{"errored_reading":false,"tab_count":676,"time":"13360252131993744","type":1,"window_count":1},{"did_schedule_command":true,"first_session_service":true,"tab_count":676,"time":"13360254668023026","type":2,"window_count":1},{"crashed":false,"time":"13360254816185268","type":0},{"restore_browser":true,"synchronous":true,"time":"13360254816273907","type":5},{"errored_reading":false,"tab_count":676,"time":"13360254817067764","type":1,"window_count":1},{"did_schedule_command":true,"first_session_service":true,"tab_count":676,"time":"13360256974796039","type":2,"window_count":1}],"session_data_status":3},

Some experimenting may tell if that is important to transfer with "workspaces" or can just rebuild itself.

Edited to add: It is when reading a mess of text like Preferences you realise how darn good Notepad++ is. Just the simple thing like clicking on an open bracket and seeing the close bracket lit up in pink makes it so much quicker to manually parse the file... Jumping to that bracket with CTRL+B...

Reading the whole of the Preferences file line by line I can see that it should not really be copied over "as is" to a new machine. For example needs paths updated (i.e. downloads), but has not broken my test machine doing this. Extensions just cleanly reset themselves we the Extension folders not found. Certainly works as a quick hack for someone not fussy who is testing or disaster recovery.

mallen

To better help the OP - here is a big clue I believe to restore Workplace titles along with the sessions files.

Refining my posts above....

Open the Preferences file and go look for

"workspaces":{"button":{"show_name":true},"link_routes":[],"list":[ {"icon":"\u003Csvg

Open the Sessions.json file and scroll to the bottom for the last "Autosaved Sessions"

      "guid": "00000000-0000-5000-a000-000000000004",
      "modifytime": 1.717069997887928e+12,
      "quarantinecount": 0,
      "tabscount": 678,
      "title": "Autosaved Sessions",
      "type": 0,
      "windowscount": 1,
      "workspaces": [ {
         "active": true,
         "icon": "\u003Csvg

There is a HUGE similarity here when you look at what is between the square brackets!

A ~~theory~~ tested fact... lift everything between the square brackets from the sessions.json and paste into the preferences... Strip out those "active": true, extra lines and this works! Workspace names can be manually restored from a sessions.json file.

Note as long as you just copy between the square brackets you don't even need to clean up all the extra white space. Preferences file is happy with that.

Just have to understand how the TABS_nnnnn and SESSIONS_nnnnn files match up. If I keep fiddling with this I'll post back anything I work out.

Note: I did this test by pulling a complex set of pages from my PC and pasting into the test PC. Also transferring the Sessions and Sessions Store folders, but instead of moving the whole Preferences file I used the Workspaces from the Sessions.json.

That should answer @mib2berlin question about what to change in the preferences file.

Hope that helps someone else.

DISCLAIMER: obviously don't try this at home without backups... I have no idea what I am doing here... Just following the patterns

Pathduck

@mallen Dealing with JSON files without proper tools is bound to you stranded up s**it creek without a paddle.

https://tomeko.net/software/JSONedit/
https://www.mitec.cz/jsonv.html
https://jqlang.github.io/jq/
JSON plugin for Notepad++ - or whatever editor you prefer to unpack/pack JSON files.
Most professional IDEs have JSON modules already.

As for the tabs and session files, these are Chromium SNSS files, basically a black box, far as I know there are no good tools to do anything with these, unless you're a developer and willing to parse Chromium's source.
https://digitalinvestigation.wordpress.com/tag/snss/

mallen

@Pathduck said in Exporting & Importing Sessions:

JSON plugin for Notepad++ - or whatever editor you prefer to unpack/pack JSON files.

The JSON files coloured up quite nice in the default notepad++ but will look at your recommended plugin.

Notepad++ is the best tool for any coding

I am guessing the preferences file is not full json? I changed the file extension to see if the colours would update, but no change. It seemed to gobble up the JSON snippet I handed it so clearly following some of the same syntax.

I ain't gonna go digging into the Chrome source. This old coders head is used to reading \ decoding the syntax of various languages so could hack around the json fine (i.e. just follow the brackets) but don't fancy trying to make sense of chrome!

The above was really a case of curiosity leading me to pulling things apart and seeing if I could stick 'em back together again.

A puzzle I may look at next is an easier way of restoring an old backup session instead of it just merging into the current session. Something I think I may be able to manage with some hacking around of the preferences \ workspaces item.

RadekPilich

@mib2berlin said in Exporting & Importing Sessions:

@ShadesOfGrey
Hi, sessions are not synced only tabs, so you can see all open tabs on other devices.
Sync is additive, a new clean device get only data from Profile 1.
If Profile 1 have 100 bookmarks and Profile 2 50 you will get 150 on both after sync.

Cheers, mib

Aren't Profiles independent? Independent to a such degree, that they require different email / sync account?
What are you talking about here mentioning new device being built up via syncing from two profiles?

mib2berlin

@RadekPilich
Profiles are independent, except one use the same account for syncing.
I have 3 accounts to manage this.
May some users use one account for 2 profiles but sync only bookmarks or something.

RadekPilich

@mib2berlin Oh, great, that's what I was hoping to get. So I just enter the same account to the second profile and then I can get all bookmarks, passwords, extensions etc synced? While at the same time having a different set of workspaces and tabs in each profile?