How to restore tabs after a Chrome crash

Chrome crashed, or updated itself, or you closed the wrong window at midnight. Here is how to get your tabs back, in the order you should try.

First: don’t open new tabs yet

Chrome’s memory of “recently closed” is short and easily overwritten. The more you click around in a fresh window, the more you risk pushing the old session out. Try the recovery steps before you start browsing.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+T

Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac) reopens the last thing you closed. Press it again and it walks further back: the tab before that, then a whole window, then sometimes the entire previous session. After a crash, this one shortcut often brings everything back in a few presses.

2. Check the Recently closed menu

Open the Chrome menu, then History. At the top you’ll see Recently closed, and after a crash it often shows an entry like “12 tabs”. Click it and the window comes back whole. The same list is at the top of chrome://history.

3. Look for Chrome’s restore prompt

When Chrome knows it exited badly, it shows a “Restore pages?” bubble on the next launch. If you dismissed it, a restart of the browser sometimes brings it back, but don’t count on it. It’s a one-time offer.

4. Dig through history

If the session is gone as a unit, the pages are still in chrome://history individually. Tedious, but it works: search for what you remember and reopen the pieces that mattered.

Making the next crash boring

Everything above depends on Chrome’s own short-term memory, which is exactly what a bad crash, a forced update, or a profile hiccup can take with it. Two things make tab loss stop being a thing that can happen to you:

1. In chrome://settings/onStartup, turn on Continue where you left off.
2. Keep an extension that snapshots your windows on a schedule, so there’s a copy Chrome can’t lose.

The second one is what our extension, UtilEngine, is for. It snapshots all your open windows every hour (you can change the interval) and keeps 14 days of history, up to 500 snapshots. Closing a window writes one final snapshot. After a crash, you press Alt+Z, type “restore”, and pick the snapshot from an hour ago. Windows you saved as named sessions also sync across your machines, so even a dead laptop doesn’t take them along.

UtilEngine is paid ($49 once, no subscription) and the snapshots are part of a larger launcher, so it’s overkill if a lost tab costs you nothing. If a lost window costs you a day, it pays for itself the first time Ctrl+Shift+T comes up empty.