How to recover lost tabs from The Great Suspender

February, 2021 | Technology

2 min read

Andrew Hatfield

Andrew has over 23 years of experience in marketing, sales, and technology across small and large organisations as well as government. With a relentless focus on customer outcomes, Andrew always looks to solve real problems

So today, Google Chrome marked The Great Suspender as malware.

The Great Suspender is dead! Long live The Great Suspender!

There is a great write up about this here, but the short of it is the extension was sold and the new owner has included significant user tracking.

One problem with this however is that you lose your suspended tabs when Google Chrome disables the extension.

The big question then, how do you get them back?

We know that the extension stores its data in LevelDB, but how can you access that? Answer, not easily.

After some research and digging around in my Chrome profile directory, I’ve found the list of tabs. Hooray!

Open a terminal and navigate to

cd /Users/<USER>/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg_0.indexeddb.blob/1
Figure 1: Finding The Great Suspender data in your Chrome profile directory

Now you can get the data out of the log files, except by default it looks like this – unhelpful

Figure 2: A dirty and messy list of The Great Suspender open tabs

This is a easy fix.

find . -type f -print|xargs strings | grep uri|sed 's/.*\(https.*\)/\1/g'
Figure 3: A clean list of The Great Suspender open tabs

And now you have some insight into what I have been looking at lately

Andrew Hatfield

Andrew has over 23 years of experience in marketing, sales, and technology across small and large organisations as well as government. With a relentless focus on customer outcomes, Andrew always looks to solve real problems

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