Tracking your Old Tabs in Chrome over Time

Starting "Has this ever happened to you?" is a very informercial way to start, but it's where my brain has left me: Working on your computer and suddenly, something happens. Blue screen. Kernel panic. Browser crash. Whatever. Restart things, open Chrome and click "Restore Tabs" and it ... does nothing.

Or does something, but not enough.

A user's list of open browser tabs and windows is a map of that user's interests. For me, there's usually 6-20 open windows with 3-12 tabs covering a number of topics that, while interesting to you, are not directly applicable right now.

And Chrome is of no help these days. As Neil Young said "It's all the same song", Google believes, between phones, tablets, laptops, desktops — heck, the talking-donkey called Google Home, for all I know — that it's all the same browser. Pages you saw recently, no matter what device, are at the top of chrome://history, and the tabs that you kept around for when you get back to that topic are way dropped out, and ironically, the tabs you looked at, rejected and closed are right at the top.

Last night, I killed lots of tabs to enhance browser stability. Today, looking for an image, I screwed up my machine, and so I rebooted. It's Linux and that's bad Linux admin work, but it wasn't a hill I wanted to die on, and when I got back on, the six windows and maybe 20 tabs total were gone. There were certain givens (Tweetdeck, Chrome) and certain trashables (work tabs for tasks completed the day before) but the "I was gonna get back to that" windows are gone, and the pages they held are deep deep deep in the communal history behind today's web comics and headline links.

I cannot get those pages and the plans I built on them back. But, I can start to get my house in order to keep it from happening again. And that starts with storing them.

This page shows the default location for Chrome user data. Lifehacker has a how-to on Restoring tabs, detailing what files hold what you need and how to force Chrome into Recovery Mode. the key things are in Current Session, Current Tabs, Last Session and Last Tabs. These files are SNSS format, which could be better (I've found a Github repo with an SNSS parser in Python, but haven't started working with it), but they respond to strings, so you have something to work on without the parser.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use feature qw{ say state } ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use utf8 ;

use DateTime ;
use File::Copy ;
use File::Path qw{ make_path } ;
use IO::Interactive qw{ interactive } ;

# program to back up chrome tabs for easy restore should things go bad
# add to your crontab with something like
#       @hourly ~/bin/chrome_tab_backup.pl

# T
#

my $now = DateTime->now()
                  ->set_time_zone('America/Indiana/Indianapolis')
                  ->set( second => 0 ) ;

my $date = $now->ymd('/') ;
my $time = $now->hms('-') ;

my $source = join '/', $ENV{HOME}, qw{ .config chromium Default } ;
my $target = join '/', $ENV{HOME}, '.chrome_backup', $date, $time ;
say $source ;
say $target ;

if ( !-d $target ) {
    my @dirs = make_path($target) ;
    }

chdir $source ;
for my $f ( grep {m{(Tabs|Session)$}n} glob '*' ) {
    say $f ;
    copy( $f, $target ) or die qq{Copy Failed: $! } ;
    }

There's a bit of generalization in this. I would prefer to make it discern what TZ you're in without hard-coding it, and I could just use UTC and everyone would know to look for the most recent one.

The Lifehacker page points to a Windows-specific (or maybe Windows and Mac, I dunno) Local State file as where you set exited_cleanly to false in order to force recovery, while in Linux it's Preferences.

Where this leaves us is a bunch of files in the directory. I could figure out a way to parse the SNSS. I could create an HTML page showing that time's open tabs, which obviates the need to force Chrome to open the correct tabs. I could begin to start grouping them by window and time, saying "You've been wanting to get back to MQTT for some time; fish or cut bait".

Plus, this example is very Linux-centric, meant to service Chromium and run in crontab. Making it run on Win7 or Win10 and Strawberry Perl and be run in Task Manager is important, as really, my Windows machine is for browsing and testing.

If all I get is "Hey, give me my tabs back!", I'll be happy.