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I use the popular Tree Style Tab firefox extension. How can I back up all open tabs and later restore them, yielding the same tab tree? The backup could be saved to the bookmarks database, or to a separate file. New backups should not overwrite old backups.

I don't really want to back up the whole session, just the tabs. Ideally I'd like to schedule a task within firefox to create a new backup daily or at browser close time.

Note that right click and "Bookmark this Tree..." works for sub-trees, but so far as I can see, not for the entire tree (you can't bookmark all open tabs this way). Meanwhile, right click and "Bookmark All Tabs..." does save all of the tabs, but loses the tree structure.

3 Answers 3

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I also use that plugin and I use the Session Manager plugin for this exact purpose. When I'm developing I often end up with a load of tabs about a particular thing and want to store them in the same tab tree order, but wouldn't want to bookmark them. I'd have tons of unwanted bookmarks.

I just save the window as a backup session and give it a relevant name, and category if required, and then when I want to retrieve them just load the session. It closes all the other tabs and opens the backup session.

I know you say you don't want to store the session, but from your description its ability to store the tab tree is just what you're looking for?

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    This answer works, because it saves all tabs from all windows.
    – valentt
    Dec 24, 2017 at 14:27
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    Be sure to enable the option in Session Manager's setting: "Supports Tree Style Tab".
    – z11i
    May 24, 2021 at 2:43
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It turns out that my question was incorrect: "Bookmark All Tabs..." works fine for this purpose. Though the list of bookmarks under the Bookmarks menu is displayed without the tree structure, that structure is present, and the "Open All in Tabs" menu item in the Bookmarks submenu restores that tree structure.

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    This didn't work for me. Using "Bookmark All Tabs" saves only bookmarks from active window. If you have multiple windows with multiple tabs this doesn't work.
    – valentt
    Dec 24, 2017 at 14:26
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    won't restore tab history
    – Junyan Xu
    Apr 14, 2018 at 20:37
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Just mention this strategy here, although it's not hugely convenient.

Short:

To get the file with all opened tabs of the current firefox session:

  1. Close the current firefox (now the file "sessionstore.jsonlz4" is generated in the profile directory).

  2. Backup (or copy) the "sessionstore.jsonlz4" file

Optional step: (e.g. to restore in a new profile)

  1. Create a new profile (firefox -p newprofile)

  2. Install TreeStyleTabs

  3. close the new firefox session BEFORE you replace the "sessionstore.jsonlz4" in the new profile directory with the file from step 2.

Long:

I used it when creating a new firefox profile because the old had some strange behavior. Having 170 open tabs (don't judge ^^) and arranged them nicely in TreeStyleTabs I wanted to take them over as they are.

Session backups are stored in the directory "sessionstore-backups" inside the firefox-profile directory "~/.mozilla/firefox/.profilename" (I think in windows it's somewhere in %appdata%) - but those are backups from older sessions?! (I don't know exactly).

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