Tabiary

Chrome closed all my windows: how to restore them

Whether Chrome crashed, the computer restarted, or you closed the wrong window, the windows you had are usually still recoverable. Some methods stop working once you close Chrome again, so go through them in order.

First: do not close and reopen Chrome to see whether the windows come back. Chrome only remembers the most recent sessions, and every restart pushes the one you want further away.

1. Reopen the last closed window

Press Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac). If the last thing you closed was a window, the whole window returns with every tab. Press it again for the window before that, and keep going.

On a Mac, Chrome keeps running after its last window is closed, so this works even when no window is open.

2. Pick the right window from "Recently closed"

Open the three-dot menu, then History. Under "Recently closed", closed windows appear as entries with a tab count, such as "14 tabs". Click the one you want.

This is the fix for a common trap: you close your main window, a small leftover window stays open, and you close that one last. On the next start Chrome restores only the small one, because it was the last to close. The big window is still in this list.

3. Check that you are in the same profile

If Chrome opened with nothing familiar at all (no bookmarks, no extensions), you may be in a different profile. Click the profile picture at the top right and switch to your usual one. Your windows belong to that profile.

4. Look at tabs from your other devices

With sync turned on, open chrome://history/syncedTabs. The tabs this computer had open at its last sync may be listed there under its name, and can be reopened one by one.

5. Rebuild from history

Open chrome://history and search by site or keyword, or scroll back to the time before the windows closed. It is slower, but history keeps about 90 days and nothing here expires when you restart.

6. Restore the session files

As a last resort, Chrome's own session files can sometimes be put back from a system backup. The steps are in how to recover tabs after a Chrome update or crash, section 6.

So it restores by itself next time