# How to Recover Chromium sessions from directory?



## Tracker (Dec 20, 2022)

I had some issues with my system and am unable to start Chromium/Chrome - how do I recover the exact state of the browser via the files stored in .config folder? Do I just copy them to a new installation?

Is there a way to recover the open tabs?


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## cracauer@ (Dec 20, 2022)

Well, whatever you do, make a tarfile backup before opening it again with Chromium.

As for restoring, I don't know any better way than to start Chromium and hope for the best.

In the future you might consider an extension like "Session Buddy", which works really well for me.


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## Tracker (Dec 20, 2022)

cracauer@ said:


> Well, whatever you do, make a tarfile backup before opening it again with Chromium.
> 
> As for restoring, I don't know any better way than to start Chromium and hope for the best.
> 
> In the future you might consider an extension like "Session Buddy", which works really well for me.


I am actually trying to copy the `.config/chromium` folder with cp to a usb - but the cp comand is giving a lot of errors with 'cp : chown : filename : invalid argument' errors while running 

And I did have Session Buddy but my file system/zfs somehow got ccorrupted - so I'm trying to see if I can salvage the sessions from Chromium/chrome by copying files under .config to a new setup


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## covacat (Dec 20, 2022)

if you cp to a fat32 fs those warnings are normal


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## Tracker (Dec 20, 2022)

covacat said:


> if you cp to a fat32 fs those warnings are normal


Yess it's fat32 . Does it mean files successfully copied?


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## SirDice (Dec 21, 2022)

FAT doesn't support setting an owner or permission on files. It therefor cannot set the ownership of those files (which is what the error is telling you). Has no influence on the actual _content_ of those files. FAT does have a file size limit though, that's 4GB (in other words, you can't save files larger than 4GB on a FAT filesystem). 






						Comparison of file systems - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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