Unsolved Restoring lost tabs and workspaces on linux

[wbsrfr99]

I am interested in restoring, recovering or reconstructing lost tabs and/or workspaces.

I have 16gb ram on a laptop running linux with desktop Vivaldi.
A few days ago I had about 24 workspaces with anywhere from 0 to 50 tabs each, so maybe a several hundred to a thousand tabs or so.

Over the past few months I noticed that Vivaldi was taking longer to load the more workspaces and tabs I added.
Eventually it would load as a blank screen and soon crash/close before loading anything. It would take several reloads to finally load the browser and use it.

I was going to save each workspace as a folder of bookmarks, but too late - one day when loading multiple pdfs in tabs it crashed and upon re-opening all the workspaces had 0 tabs.

I couldn't find any saved sessions and backups inside the browser menu options even though I had the options enabled - unless they exist somewhere as files.

Currently I have enabled:

Automatic Session Backup
Startup with Last Session
Lazy Load Restored Tabs
Always Load Pinned Tabs
Save Browsing History Three Months

I have almost 2gb in cache data, autosave.bin, json, bak, Tabs_ files, etc in the Default folder copied - can any of that be used to restore some or all of the tabs back into my workspaces or at least all together as a list which I can sort??

I don't mind sifting through and sorting files, adding all tabs to a text file/html list, whatever - as long as there is something to work with.

And as a reminder to any readers - make bookmarks, backups, copies, etc on a regular basis. It's better to have duplicates and more than nothing at all.

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/51704/guide-v-backup-extra-steps?lang=en-US
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/94703/guide-recover-sessions-workspaces-after-upgrade
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/install-update/full-reset-of-vivaldi/#Backup_Vivaldi_data:~:text=before you proceed.-,Backup Vivaldi data,-One option to

Also consider using multiple internet browsers each for different uses to prevent putting and losing all projects "into one basket" - one browser.

[mib2berlin]

@wbsrfr99
Hi, before you change anything copy/backup your profile folder "Default", it is in .config/vivaldi

With the default settings of "Automatic Session Backup" Vivaldi create 3 files.
They are stored in the folder Sessions in your user profile.
It looks like:

Can you reach/see the files in the sessions panel?

There is a sessions.json and a sessions.bak.
If you are lucky you can change the sessions.json to sessions.json_xyz and the sessions.bak to sessions.json.
Then the sessions are reachable again.
If not you may can edit the sessions.json manually, this need a Json editor at first.

Cheers, mib

[wbsrfr99]

The default folder was found in:
/home/USERNAME/.var/app/com.vivaldi.Vivaldi/config/vivaldi

I see 3 session files but the date modified are from this week, the crash happened last week. It's possible I opened up Vivaldi too many times since then.

I tried the json and bak rename and file exchange but I don't see any older sessions or tabs in workspaces available.

What Json editor for linux is recommended and what do I do when editing the sessions.json manually?