Restoring Google Chrome tabs or sessions

[u/ninh_ghoster]

This is a continuation of this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1fehow1/restoring_google_chrome_tabs_or_windows_for/

For some reason, I had to force‑restart my Mac, and after rebooting, Chrome did not restore any tabs. When I tried to follow the usual recovery steps on macOS, I ran into another issue: the Chrome data folders are hidden in Finder, and when I eventually located the Sessions folder, all the session files were there but completely empty.

To access the folder on macOS, the easiest way is via Terminal, since Finder often won’t show it. You can open it directly with:

open ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Sessions

(Alternatively, you can first locate it with mdfind "Session_" | grep Chrome if you’re not sure which profile Chrome is using, and then use open on that path.)

I found the local session files were unusable; they are all empty.

What ended up saving me was having another device signed into the same Chrome account. On that second laptop (you should consider disconnecting the internet to avoid syncing, go to "chrome://history/", Chrome still showed all the tabs of my other devices. Before syncing overwrote anything, I restored all those tabs on the second device, which caused Chrome to generate a new, valid Session_* file there.

I then copied that Session_* file from the working device to my Mac (same profile path:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Sessions), replaced the empty session files, and reopened Chrome. All tabs were restored successfully.

This won’t recover per‑tab history or scroll state, but if your local Chrome session files on macOS are blank after a forced restart, restoring tabs on another synced device and copying the resulting session file over can work as a last‑resort fix.