Recently I’d been having hardware issues with my Mac which resulted in quite a few hard shutdowns for the machine. Once I got up and running I found to my surprise that I’d managed to lose all of my Safari windows and tabs of which I had in abundance. This was rather distressing as I have far too much research on topics open at any given time for anything from stream processing systems to certificate authorities to research on containerisation to creating grids in AngularJS. Suffice to say I wasn’t excited at the prospect of losing that information.

A quick Google search gave me a bit of hope. There was an article on Mac OS X hints about “Safari loses all your open tabs: recover using Time Machine“. It suggests using a tab backup extension but failing that you can recover it from Time Machine. I have Time Machine backups so this one was easy.

The steps to get this sorted were:

• Stop Safari.
• Connect to Time Machine backup.
• Look for ~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist in the Time Machine backup (if you press “SHIFT+APPLE+G” and then paste that address, Finder will take you directly to the file).
• Restart Safari and go “History” -> “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”

Once I did that all of my windows and tabs were restored! As an aside I got curious to see what was in the file and if you are curious too there are a few ways to open up a plist file like this one.