Chrome – Recently Visited Tabs Disappeared

Background:

Google Chrome is very good at maintaining a history of open tabs, which allows for a great multitasking web browsing experience.

Issue:

Since Chrome frequently and correctly restores tabs, many users might not realize a strong dependence on this feature until it breaks. Over the last three years, there have been only a few occasions when Chrome has crashed and wasn’t able to successfully restore the previously opened tabs. After building a dependence on always having the same tabs restored, suddenly not having access to these tabs can be devastating.

Solution:

Chrome stores the currently open tabs as well as the last session’s open tabs in a few important files labeled: Current Session and Current Tabs as well as Last Session and Last Tabs. On Ubuntu, these files are stored in the local user’s home directory.

~/.config/google-chrome/Default

If Chrome isn’t displaying the correct tabs from the last sessions, a quick fix is to rename Last Session and Last Tabs to Current Session and Current tabs, then restart Chrome.
If that quick fix doesn’t work, the issue might be more serious as Chrome only keeps track of the current session and one previous session. To extend the history, routine backups can be kept and these Session and Tabs files can be restored from a backup.