Restoring Google Chrome tabs or windows (for Windows) after accidentally closing them or restarting computer

Hi guys, I'm making this post because I just spent hours trying to restore all my grouped tabs / windows I had open before completely shutting down my computer and moving it to a different location. Normally when I do this or when there is an automatic update and everything restarts, google chrome will prompt/ask me if I want to restore my recently closed tabs. Today it did not do that, and I realize that I take a risk every time I do that seeing as I am hoarding over 100 tabs for work and all my side projects. I also see that everywhere online, many people are either giving the CTRL+SHIFT+T advice, which only works if its generally within the same session, or they just say its not possible and you should download some extension to avoid it happening again in the future. However, I found this reddit post about someone who experienced the same issue and used a method of directly accessing the location on your computer where google stores your most recent sessions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/18apmuo/restoring_tabs_after_a_crash_chrome_for_windows/

I followed this and have some things to add, as the post is now archived. But I will recap the steps and give my experience, which I think should work 100% of the time, as long as you can find the file. YOU WILL HAVE YOUR PRECIOUS TABS BACK.

1. Keep chrome open. This is not entirely necessary as I opened and closed a few times before recovering my tabs, but I'd recommend it so that it's less confusing when you're looking through the session files, as Google will save those recent sessions too. Also I'm not sure how many recent sessions get saved before they begin to overwrite, so it's best to minimize the number of Google Chrome sessions you open before you complete step 3.

2. Open file explorer (WindowsKey+E for shortcut). Click on the 'view' tab at the top, click 'show', then check the 'hidden items' button. Now you can navigate to this directory C:\Users\<yourname>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

3. Locate the 'Sessions' folder and copy it. Go to your desktop or any quick access location and paste it there. It's going to give you an error that says one of the files is still in use, just click to skip those files. Those are the tab/session files that you currently have open.

4. Now you have a copy of what google has saved for you. Open your copied folder and click the 'sort' tab at the top, then click 'group by' and click 'size'. The session you want is the largest file. You may be tempted to think the file you want to restore is the oldest dated one, as you've likely had these tabs open for months, but for me it was the largest one, stamped with the time that I turned my computer completely off to move it. So it may help you locate the correct file if you remember when you turned off/restarted/updated your pc/ accidentally closed all your tabs. But if you want to make super sure you have the correct file and not some other session that doesn't have all the tabs you want, you can double click and open those files in notepad. The session files are just text files written in binary that have all the URL links from your tabs. I copied all of the text into https://www.browserling.com/tools/extract-urls to get rid of the confusing text, then copied the extracted URLs into a google doc (it was still over 150 pages), and I was able to confirm the links were recognizably from the session I wanted to recover after scrolling and inspect the first couple pages. Finally, copy that file. We will be moving it back into the original 'Sessions' folder in the next step.

5. This next step will require you to close Google, as you will be deleting all the files in the original 'Sessions' folder you copied (C:\Users\<yourname>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Sessions) and you can't do that with an active Google Chrome session open. Once you have deleted all the files and the folder is empty (don't worry you have the copy), paste in the file you've identified as the session you want to restore so that it is the only file in the folder.

6. Reopen Google. It shouldn't prompt you to restore any tabs/windows or anything, but just open directly to all your tabs back that you lost. If you opened Google and it didn't open any tabs, or it prompts you to restore and it brings back the tabs you just now closed to test this, it is probably the wrong file. If you're lazy, just empty the original 'Sessions' folder again, and try again one by one, with each file from your copied folder individually.

You don't need luck for this one. Google just needs to have done its job storing all recent sessions on your computer.

Please comment if you have any questions, I'll do my best to help. Big thank you to the original poster , you saved my butt. I just hope more people can see this before they give up after the very unmotivating results online.