Restore Previous open tabs after Windows Update

OK, sorry, I was only reacting to the advisor's unhelpful suggestion. If you're looking for a way to find out which tabs were opened in the session that was lost during the update, I'm afraid it's not straightforward and may not be possible. However, there is an online tool that may help.

First, you have to find the file that Edge uses to store details of open tabs in a particular session. Each profile has its own set of files, so if you only have one profile, its data are stored in a folder called Default. You can open this folder thus:

1. Close down all Edge instances.
2. Copy this path:
   %localappdata%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default
3. Open File Explorer (Winkey + E), paste into the address bar and press Enter.
4. Open the folder called Sessions. Each file in that folder contains details of the current and at least one previous session.
   1. If you see a file called Tabs_{long number} whose modified date corresponds to the session you lost, you're in luck.
   2. If you don't see any file from the lost session, right-click on the Sessions folder and select Restore previous version. If you see a previous version with a likely-looking date, click Restore > Restore to and choose a folder to restore to, e.g. on your desktop.
5. If you found a likely-looking Tabs_... file,
   1. Open Edge and navigate to Chrome Session Restore / Recovery of corrupted Session files (lsauer.net)
   2. Follow the instructions on the page to inject the file either by drag-and-drop or by using the Choose filesbox.
   3. The small arrow ⏷ should reveal the tabs from the session concerned. Each entry is a link to the page, so you can open the ones you want in the current Edge session.

Good luck!

Hello,

My name is Ben, and I'm with Microsoft Edge as  Community Manager. I saw this thread and wanted to check in on this issue, in order to see if I could help.

If I understand your concern, you are frustrated you lost your previous tabs and, while you know how to save tabs in the future, you wished for a method of recovering a large number of lost tabs. Is that correct? If that's the case, my first thought is to see if the History has them. This issue has happened to me before. When I go to the "..." in the top right corner, click on History, it can show individual websites. If a large number of tabs were closed all at once, recently, one of the top options should have an icon that looks like a stack of squares. Clicking on that will restore all lost tabs.

If, however, the history does not have this tab-block, then the issue may not be easily restored. Should that be the case, I sincerely apologize. In either situation, I am forwarding this report to the team so they can look into other ways to prevent data loss in the future. If you have any other questions, or if this doesn't speak to the matter, please let me know.

Thank you, and have a great day!

-Ben

This was an excellent tip, except that as soon as I opened Edge to point it to the recovery file, the promising looking Tabs files in my Sessions folder were immediately destroyed (overwritten) by the new Edge session.

I know I should use Collections, but I thought my session would be restored post-update. I often leave several tabs open (opened over a span of days, so History is not much help) as a reminder of work that's in-progress. Sucks when an update wipes them out (and yes, I checked for the tab-block at the top of History / Recently closed).

An unscheduled reboot of Windows 10 to install updates has deleted all of my open tabs in Edge Chromium. 

This infuriating behaviour has allegedly been fixed. The release notes for Dev channel update to 92.0.891.1 include this passage:

• Fixed an issue where tabs sometimes aren’t restored after the browser is forcibly closed by a Windows Update-initiated machine restart.

While fixes like this are sometimes ported to all channels (Canary, Dev, Beta and Stable), many of them have to go through the testing phases before they reach the Stable version. You may have to wait a few weeks to enjoy it.

i think this is by design - now when ever the New Edge crashes 2 or 3 times per week, it loses all your open tabs, history and settings. This allows you to start all over from fresh without having to worry about whatever you were doing before.

Actually putting in a working session manager into Edge like all other browsers have would be too much work and make it even more unstable.