Any way to recover lost workspaces?
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This is really frustrating
In an effort to have fewer open windows, I have created Workspaces for various research topics, organizing the tabs into stacks, and then closing them to retrieve them later.
However, I have discovered that unlike bookmarks and history, if Vivaldi crashes, all of that tab memory is lost. The Workspaces names remain, but they are listed as having zero tabs.
I've discovered that some of the data can be retrieved from the trash, but if the Workspace wasn't open, or an open Workspace hadn't been used in a while, it won't be referenced in the tab trash. Which means I have to manually go through the history and hope that most of the tabs were opened on the same day or week.
Is there another way to retrieve these Workspaces? And anyone know why this info isn't stored in the same way as history or bookmarks? Losing Workspace data in this way seems to defeat the point of Workspaces in the first place.
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@simpleknight Enable automatic session backup in the sessions panel. It saves your session at the end of a session, when closing the browser. It keeps one backup for each day. As long as you don’t keep your browser open for days, it’s a reliable way to backup sessions. You can of course always save a session manually.
Should you make regular/incremental system backups with time machine, you can retrieve your working profile with intact session from there. Anyway, backups are the key, however you do it.
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@luetage Thanks for that guidance, I have turned that on. Unfortunately, that only helps me for some of this issue in future.
I still hold that the whole concept of Workspaces is misleading, and I don't think your solution will help with that problem.
Let's say I do some research on a bunch of purchasing for an item for work. I set up a bunch of stacks for say options at different websites, but we aren't yet ready to make a purchase, and I don't want to have all of those windows open, since Vivaldi is no better than Chrome at having a bunch of windows open. I do this A LOT.
I will then name the Workspace and close it, to retrieve later, hoping all of my organization will remain intact.
Sessions doesn't save that info if I understand your statement correctly. That is, you mention not keeping a browser open for days. I sometimes do this. I assume then you mean it only backs up when quitting. But I also assume that it only backs up OPEN windows, tabs, stacks, and workspaces. Thus, if I have closed a workspace, it isn't truly backed up.
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@simpleknight If you want to save and close a workspace, you have to save it manually. The automated backup functionality is for recovering from an unintentional loss of tabs/workspaces and doesn’t cover removing a workspace on purpose. It is what it is. This is not my solution, it’s what Vivaldi provides to us users. If you need something else, take a look at feature requests. Someone might already have issued something along these lines, support it or write a new one.
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I think you're missing my problem.
I create a window with several stacks, and then create and name a workspace. At this point, it appears "saved".
But, this isn't enough.
I think ALSO have to save all tabs as a session, but again, this doesn't (I think) include closed workspaces.
So long as I don't crash, if I create a new window and then select a Workspace, all of its tabs open.
However... when Vivaldi crashes, it remembers the NAMES of the Workspaces, but not their tabs.
If I haven't interacted with a Workspace in a while, it doesn't appear in the tab trash, and also not in the history. Which in my view, defeats the whole purpose of Workspaces.
While I do keep three or four Workspaces open that I use daily or weekly, I expected that if I close a Workspace window, it is somehow statically saved, and that its reference should be available even if the browser crashes, and the Workspace isn't currently open.
Otherwise, I have to have ALL Workspaces open all the time, and I run up against Vivaldi's memory cap, which has the same issues as all Chromium browsers.
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It seems to me that you want something like Plan 9 — an OS that had great promise!
But, since you seem worried about RAM/disk space, you'd not be able to run it...Are you old enough to remember black/green boards? You'd write on them with chalk. And, when you wanted to re-use them, you'd erase them — wipe the chalk off.
When you delete (close) a workspace, you're erasing that chalkboard; the tabs should be accessible from the closed-tabs page (the trashcan icon) but the "chalkboard" isn't.Three questions:
One, why don't you use Time Machine?
Two, why won't you use saved sessions for keeping work you don't want in RAM?
And, three, how enimic is your system, that it causes you to close (delete) workspaces?I run three or four profiles with an average of ~300 tabs and I have no issues to speak of. (I do have 16 GB of RAM and an i5 processor.)
Also, and specially, I'm curious about your mention of crashes... They should be rare, no?
(They have been for me.)
Is there something about your system/setup that might be causing frequent crashes?
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One final thought (which I'm afraid might offend you... ): Workspaces are just another way of managing your open tabs/windows. (They are tied to the windows from which they're opened, and accessible from all child windows...) They do NOT save RAM usage.
They are NOT separate entities, like windows!
That's what Sessions are for. -
Don't appreciate your tone, but...
I have north of 2000 tabs open at any one time. I need 500 of those directly for work, the rest are research tabs. Vivaldi crashes once per week minimum. I have an iMac Pro with 128 GB of RAM.
I moved to Vivaldi to better manage all of these tabs.
As for your very condescending suggestion that Workspaces are like chalkboards... sincerely?! These are computers that can do far more.
But more to the point, you supercilious wombat, Vivaldi has a function where you NAME stacks and WORKSPACES. Doing such a thing ENCOURAGES assuming they are saved, and when things work correctly, you CAN close them and then later reopen them will all included tabs.
Thus, my request is perfectly reasonable: why allow naming if there isn't a backup file that allows me to reclaim such tabs after a crash?
It is my considered opinion that your unnecessary response is intended more as trolling than anything else, and you should considering volunteering at your local church, synagogue, mosque, or rotary club.
You have too much time on your hands, and I only responded to practice dressing down someone such as yourself without resorting to imprecations.
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Ok, so... I think I've come up with a strategy that SHOULD help me with my problem:
If I do some research and create a workspace, before I close it, I should do a session save.
It's not a perfect solution: different sessions will have different workspaces open unless I open everything before I save the session. But at least I will have that workspace saved.
It's an annoying solution; I have already suggested the feature that a saved workspaces is as protected as bookmarks. But at least I can know that my research isn't completely lost.
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@OakdaleFTL
What about four, use bookmarks and organize the sessions into folders? Bookmarks are easy to back up and easy to restore. They also do not take up as much memory when not in use. -
I too lost my previously opened tabs in Workspace. The @Vivaldi team must take a pause on releasing shiny new features and focus on resolving these bugs instead.
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@simpleknight
I'm sorry you're experiencing that, but unfortunately, I couldn't reproduce the error you describe on my Mac. I've tried creating a workspace with multiple tab stacks and crashing the browser. Each time, the browser was restored to a previous state - with all the tabs and tab stacks in the correct workspaces.
Can you provide more information about your machine (macOS version, machine, Vivaldi version) and, as far as possible, exact steps to reproduce this issue? A crashlog would also be great. -
Thanks for your response.
I am currently using Vivaldi Mac:
7.0.3495.23 (Stable channel) (x86_64)
Revision 72d89227db29f524d89b1af38163f46e4ed7746e
OS macOS Version 15.1.1 (Build 24B91)
JavaScript V8 13.0.245.20
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Command Line /Applications/Vivaldi.app/Contents/MacOS/Vivaldi --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --disable-smooth-scrolling --save-page-as-mhtml
Executable Path /Applications/Vivaldi.app/Contents/MacOS/Vivaldi
Profile Path /Users/eliot/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/Default
Linker lldI'm on an iMac Pro:
3GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon
Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16GB
128 GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM
MacOS Sequoia 15.1.1I doubt the OS version is significant, as I've had this issue of lost windows on and off over several OS versions. Same with losing the saved tabs in Tab Stacks when they arrived, and then also Workspaces.
I currently have 49 open windows 30 of them have an average of 30 open tabs in various configurations. 6 have over 70 tabs. The rest have 5 or less, so it works out to around 1400 open tabs at any one time. I religiously hibernate background tabs. I try and name as workspaces tabs I am not actively using. I currently only have 8 workspaces, but at the time of this particular crash, I had at least 50 Workspaces.
I often have trouble with Google products not allowing me to do anything while I wait. I am logged into 8 Google accounts simultaneously.
Recently, I saved a Workspace and closed it, and the browser crashed. This has happened often with different versions of Vivaldi. It hadn't happened in a while, so I assume it was due to my recently updating to the current version. I didn't lose my tabs on that crash.
This only seems to happen when the browser crashes in such a way that it will leave one blank window or starting window. For instance, if I open a new window, and it never fully opens. Sometimes when this happens (and thankfully it's only happen 10 or so times over the last year or two), I will wait for an hour to see if it will resolve. But all of the times it happens, I have to eventually force quit because the quit function isn't working.
However, there are also times when quitting works with a window at the front that hasn't loaded, and that also causes the issue. When I relaunch, none of the tabs are there and I have to go into the tab trash to try and recover my windows. I no longer quit at that point unless I wait the hour. Sometimes when I wait, after 10-20 min the window opens, and then I quit out to reset things.
I have a LOT of RAM, but I also have a lot of tabs, and I think this is the main reason for the crashing. I would like that solved, but no browser seems to be able to handle this many tabs consistently. But losing workspaces upon crashing is really annoying.
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Honestly, the only thing I can think of that might cause your issues - I'm not aware of any issue causes the problems restoring workspaces, is a 'Startup' -> 'Startup with' -> 'Lazy Load Restored Tabs' setting, and 'Web Panels' -> 'Lazy Load'. Can you make sure those are enabled? You might disable 'Always Load Pinned Tabs' if you have a lot of pinned tabs as well.
@simpleknight said in Any way to recover lost workspaces?:
This only seems to happen when the browser crashes in such a way that it will leave one blank window or starting window. For instance, if I open a new window, and it never fully opens. Sometimes when this happens (and thankfully it's only happen 10 or so times over the last year or two), I will wait for an hour to see if it will resolve. But all of the times it happens, I have to eventually force quit because the quit function isn't working.
If those settings are currently disabled for you, that might suggest why you're getting this issue.
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@qjava User runs with over 2000 tabs. Why would lazy loading a few web panels matter? Has the Vivaldi team ever tested the maximum amount of tabs Vivaldi can handle with a specified amount of RAM? Does the UI run into issues when being required to load thousands of tabs?
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@luetage said in Any way to recover lost workspaces?:
User runs with over 2000 tabs. Why would lazy loading a few web panels matter?
Generally, the lazy load of everything would improve almost every situation.
For example, lazy load of "a few" web panels:
@simpleknight have around 50 windows open at the same time, and each of them probably has a couple of web panels, it quickly adds up to several hundred tabs. That's already a significant number.@luetage said in Any way to recover lost workspaces?:
Has the Vivaldi team ever tested the maximum amount of tabs Vivaldi can handle with a specified amount of RAM? Does the UI run into issues when being required to load thousands of tabs?
It's quite difficult to test at all. It all depends on the operating system, hardware, type of tabs, settings and workflow. I'm aware that for some it's usually fine to run 1-2k tabs simultaneously, but it's problematic for some users. That's why we can't give you a recommendation on how many tabs is the “maximum”, if that's what you're asking.
@simpleknight if the lazy load doesn't help you, I suppose you're running multiple extensions as well - those might be affecting your use case negatively - that would be my guess, as I'm unable to reproduce it on my own.
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@qjava Thanks for your response
I don't have many, but I do have some:
Bitwarden
Random Refresh
Beyond20
UBlock Origin
AdBlockThis was happening before I added Random Refresh, so I don't think that's to blame. I would also suspect that it's not Beyond20, I was having similar issues (before Workspaces) before I installed that. At that time, if I tried to quit out, it would sometimes freeze on one empty window, which would then need me to force quit and all of the windows from before would be lost.
I'll come at this a different way: where does Vivaldi store the tabs for Workspaces? Is it possible to manually back that up through drag-copying it?
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@simpleknight said in Any way to recover lost workspaces?:
I'll come at this a different way: where does Vivaldi store the tabs for Workspaces? Is it possible to manually back that up through drag-copying it?
I think you mentioned using Sessions Panel to automatically save and restore tabs, if that doesn't work either the session file is corrupt and cannot recover fully, or something stops the windows from restoring tabs. Manual restore probably won't work in that case.
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Hm
It seems as though the Sessions panel doesn't save closed Workspaces, am I wrong about that? That it only saves open Workspaces? If that's true, then the Sessions wouldn't help. I need the part that saves the closed Workspace info.
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I've just experienced this issue - lost all tabs in many workspaces, yet again - i.e. many times over recent years. This seems to happen every time apple applies a system update. So I can't reproduce that (would imply redo the update). Since I autosave sessions I can recover the tabs, but this always leaves a messy mix with some tabs put back in the original workspaces and others in the WS_Name (Session) workspaces, so I have to go through manually and re-merge them, it's a hassle.
I guess something gets broken in the process of apple system requesting apps to shut down, then restarting them on reopen, maybe links get moved or some cache gets purged.
