Unsolved Vivaldi Lost ALL Open Tabs and Session

[yaha12]

This has happened to me a few times in the past (on both Linux and MacOS), but yesterday was annoying enough that it pushed me to reach out for help.

I have two device that use Vivaldi, a desktop and a laptop. Let's call them A and B, respectively, for convenience.

I had to do a hard reboot on device A yesterday because it was freezing up (Linux updates or something like that). Upon booting back up, I opened the Vivaldi just to discover that my 200+ tabs are all gone. It should be pointed out that I had pinned tabs, stacked tabs, etc. All of it was gone. It looked as if the browser was opened in a clean state.

Upon clicking on the trash icon, I saw that it was empty. There was no session saved there. However, I COULD see the synced tabs from device B. These devices have some overlapping work, but definitely not all.

Also, whenever I clicked on the trash bin icon on device B, I could see the very missing synced session on device A! That was my chance, right? The idea was to open a new window on device B, open all tabs from that synced session and at least have it open on one device. I would figure out how to migrate them into device A. However, I quickly discovered that opening a new window results in a disabled trash icon bin button, so I couldn't use this path. I then figured I could open these tabs one by one and save them manually or with the help of an extension.

However, before I could do that, I had to restart device A again (GPU driver hybernation issues). Upon doing that, I saw that device B now didn't not have that session in sync anymore. Instead, it showed the most recent one (22 tabs instead of 200+ tabs).

My questions are roughly as follows:

• why does this happen? Upon doing some research, I discovered that I am far from the only person to whom this has happened. Clearly, it seems like a bug of some sort that corrupts sessions or does allow them to be stored properly.

• what can I do at this point to get the original session on device A?

[dude99]

@yaha12 Sorry this happened to u today.

It seems your problem is slightly different than mine from the past, because you did a hard reboot while Vivaldi didn't shutdown properly, this situation usually have very high chances of causing file corruption (especially if Vivaldi is accessing the file when u do hard reboot). So my guess is the session file is corrupted during hard reboot, not during the restart.

Usually when I'm forced to do hard reboot & unable to shutdown Vivaldi properly, I will monitor Vivaldi's disk activity & wait for it to stop completely before initiating reboot. Then after restart, I won't startup Vivaldi immediately, instead I will go to the Default folder & move all older session file to another folder before I startup Vivaldi. The reason is Vivaldi will overwrite older session file with newest one during startup, & thus if the newest session is corrupted - you will end up with ONE copy of corrupted session file without any backup! This is a badly design behavior I have criticize Vivaldi for many years, but they never willing to improve this for whatever reason...

Then the sync session seems to be acting pretty weird too... Unfortunately I can't comment on this sync session thingy cuz I'm not familiar with it (I rarely use it cuz I deemed it's not stable & reliable enough). You should file a detail bug report on this one to let the V team know about it, hopefully they can fix this if it's a bug, or at least improve the function if it's a flawed design.

Now, the only solution I can offer u is recommend this JS mod by @LonM. It will auto save session for x copies periodically, it's more reliable than most extensions cuz it save session via Vivaldi internal session system: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/33047/autosave-sessions-mod. IMHO this is the backup solution Vivaldi needed to soften the blow of botched startup session, because it allow us to go back in time & restore session from multiple timeline if needed.

Other related topics you might be interested:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/415993
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/310397
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/331737

Also, you probably should resolved the device stability issue before keep using it for important task. Bad incidents like this will just keep happening if it's not resolved properly. Then, make sure you always have at least 1GB of free disk space for Vivaldi to write data to disk when it's running.

[yaha12]

@dude99 said in Vivaldi Lost ALL Open Tabs and Session:

...
Also, you probably should resolved the device stability issue before keep using it for important task. Bad incidents like this will just keep happening if it's not resolved properly. Then, make sure you always have at least 1GB of free disk space for Vivaldi to write data to disk when it's running.

I did discover that mod you mentioned while researching the issue yesterday. I did implement the mod on both of my devices. It appears that the idea is at least three years old. Why it is not part of default functionality is beyond me. I would implement something along the lines of having 5 sessions from the last hour or so, as well as a session from each day in the past two weeks. I would also allow the user to change these settings to what suits them.

I also filed a bug about this, but it does seem that the Vivaldi team is mind-bendingly reticent and defensive about implementing this. From reading the forums, it appears as if they take it as a personal offense that users point out these issues. I have even seen them suggest that one should get a UPS to prevent having these issues in the future.

And immediately, I am not interested. Why do it if the issue can be safely resolved at the browser functionality levels. I get it, hard reboots are not optimal. I do resolve my issues ASAP, but this has happened to my Vivaldi browsers even out of the blue, without any hard reboots. In a way, it is like playing Russian roulette.

Let's hope something gets done about this. We can hope, can't we?

Thanks for your help!

[dude99]

@yaha12 said in Vivaldi Lost ALL Open Tabs and Session:

From reading the forums, it appears as if they take it as a personal offense that users point out these issues. I have even seen them suggest that one should get a UPS to prevent having these issues in the future.

Most comments u read in the forum aren't from V team, they rarely reply in the forum. There will always be some diehard fanboy obsessed with defending certain browser, so just ignore 'em when they "assault" u in the forum, cuz they can't really help u much. LOL