Update, June 24th

It occurred to me that it is possible some of you may be reading this post in the hopes of discovering how to configure Chrome to automatically resume your previous session. Fortunately, that’s easy! Simply click on Configure (that’s the wrench icon in the upper right), then click on “options” and make certain that “reopen the pages that were open last” is selected under on startup in the “basics” configuration category.

The crux of this post doesn’t address what I have highlighted here; instead, it assumes that your browser is already resuming the last open session. Furthermore, the solution offered here 1) presumes that your typical use case includes having more than one browser window open with multiple tabs each and 2) is intended to recover your last session after you have inadvertently clobbered it, either by opening only one (1) window from your previous session–and then promptly closing it–or by closing so many tabs that Chrome’s new tab session selection no longer shows your previous windows.

I should also mention that this solution may or may not work for those of you who do not have Chrome configured to reopen your last session. There is a possibility that this fix works only in the circumstance that you do.

Unclobbering your Session

I’ve been using Chrome for quite some time because it’s markedly faster than Firefox. I still use Firefox regularly, but my tab addiction doesn’t seem to play nicely anymore with any browser I use. Unfortunately, there’s one glaring shortcoming with Chrome’s UI that drives me nuts: If you have dozens of tabs spread out across two or three Windows, you can recover your last session from Chrome’s default empty tab UI if and only if you haven’t recently closed enough new tabs that would otherwise overwrite your session history. Worse, extensions like FreshStart don’t always recover your previous browsing state–in fact, I’ve had very poor luck with FreshStart displaying empty sessions or not remembering all of my open windows! So what do you do?

Before you think “Crap, I just lost 200 tabs” and close Chrome again, don’t. Do copy Chrome’s user data (%APPDATA%/Local/Google/Chrome (Windows), ~/.config/chromium/Default (Chromium, Linux), ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/ (Chrome, Linux–thanks to Joe in the comments)) to a safe location before closing Chrome a second time. Or, optionally, copy Last Session and Last Tabs from %APPDATA%/Local/Google/Chrome to a safe location. Close Chrome once you’ve finished copying the appropriate files; if Windows complains that it can’t copy Current Session and Current Tabs, ignore it. We’ll be replacing these later. If you’ve already closed Chrome, be absolutely certain that you copy these files before you restart the browser. Upon restart, Chrome will wipe any and all chances you have to recover from this accident.

Next, examine the contents of %APPDATA%/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default. Delete or rename the files Current Tabs and Current Session. Then, copy the Last Session and Last Tabs from the backup(s) you made, and rename those to Current Session and Current Tabs, but be mindful of the timestamps. They should match the date and time you last closed Chrome.

Restart Chrome, and it will magically be delivered back to the state it was in before you clobbered your previous session! The trick here, of course, is to not close Chrome a second time once you’ve realized your folly. Doing so will overwrite your previous session, giving you nothing to recover.

If you’re a taboholic like me, this will help you recover what you’ve lost, and it should work for most incidentals! If not, post here with your problems or offer your own unique solutions.