Empty 7MB file? Firefox sessionstore.bak

[M0RPH]

Lost all my tabs in Firefox, happens so often that I am trained to immediately copy the sessionstore.bak file so I can restore it. Change the extension to .js and copy it back to my profile folder, well Firefox refuses to use it, as happens sometimes because the file gets corrupted. Usually I can open the file and correct the header format with some instructions I found online.

This time I cannot read the file. I've tried opening it in Notepad, Wordpad and Dreamweaver. It just shows a blank file. Is it possible for a 7MB file to be blank?

 

[Ketchup]

Not sure about that file, as it is hidden, but it sounds like it's time to back up personal items (I use MozBackup) and do an uninstall, reinstall.

 

[Morbus]

Check the recently closed windows menu, as well as the tab groups. It may be a blank clean window, but it may still have your session on a recently closed window, or maybe it's simply hidden in other tab groups.

 

[code65536]

If the sessionstore file is blank, then it's been corrupted, and there's nothing that you can do. This might happen if the browser crashed right when it was writing to the file--that would be a rare coincidence, but not impossible.

Also, there could be disk or file system errors independent of the browser.

Why did you try to replace the main .js file with the .bak file? Was the .js file corrupted, too? In theory, with both the main .js file and the .bak file, you are screwed only if both files are hosed.

If I'm replacing the .js with the .bak, I always make a backup of the .js file (and the .bak) before I replace it with the .bak, in the event the .bak file is somehow in worse shape than the .js file. I'm an obsessive tab hoarder with thousands of tabs, so I'm paranoid. (And I've accumulated, over time, a couple dozen of these sorts of manual backups, which can be handy if something really bad happens.) I know it won't help, but it's something to keep in mind for the future.

@Morbus: Recently-closed windows are stored in sessionstore.js.


Edit: Wait, your sessionstore was around 7MB?! That's... a lot of tabs--it's almost as big as mine! I would cry if that had happened to me.