(This is the second question in a series including Is it possible to save a web browser (specifically, Google Chrome) session and/or cache to your computer permanently? If so, how, with what tools?, sharing as would be expected a similar context. While the context is written from my perspective, I'd imagine there are several people with similar problems that would like to know if this solution is available and how.)
Apologies in advance if this is not a fitting question for this platform—if it isn't, please don't bite me and direct me to the right platform if applicable. BTW, I am asking this right now as solving the problem-to-be-mentioned that an affirmative answer to this will assist in solving is one aspect of my New Years' Resolutions, and would be a wonderful belated Christmas gift.
Anyway, I have a major problem with the Google Chrome browser on my computer. Due to several factors, I have wound up with having over 1200 tabs on 16 windows open on Google Chrome. This is immensely inconvenient for obvious reasons, and has led to dysfunction in many areas of my life. A large reason why this has come to be is a feedback loop of incomplete garbage collection. I open new tabs to look at something (more closely) and or comment on it, which of course takes time and often requires doing in several discontinuous sessions. Sometimes, either due to my computer randomly deciding to update, my browser crashing or updating, or occasionally deliberate restarts, the browser is restarted, clearing its cache and resulting in the work-in-progress at the moment being deleted and occasionally whole webpages being changed or deleted outright. If I were to estimate, since 2019 about half of my content longer than 3 paragraphs has had to be rewritten from scratch at least once because of that. Since new stuff is constantly coming into be, this results in more and more "to be completed" stuff accumulating.
And yes, I understand that solving the cache-clearing issue will accentuate one of the main nasty symptoms of high tab count—massive RAM usage—but hopefully, if this is possible, this (along with other measures) will allow me to end the cycle and allow me to slowly reduce the tab count to a reasonable level. (And JSYK, trying to simply archive every one of my comments and other content before on an external document while I type them has historically resulted in me needing to spend almost twice as much time per comment than normal.)
Best Answer
Provided that you have a google account, and are logged in to your google account, the following should provide for a proper re-loading of all content upon starting chrome:
Navigate to "Settings" via "three-vertical-dots" menu in the upper right. Upon mouse-over of three-dot icon you will see "customize and control google chrome".
This works well for me with multiple pages and 150+ tabs. I have not tested it with over 1000 tabs, so cannot guarantee that there is no limit. Google works pretty well with a very heavy memory-footprint, and should sync everything that you configure it to sync.
Give it a try! aprilia1k - Stephen
[A separate, or additional solution which I recommend you look into with one or two of those tabs, is a Chrome extension called "Session Buddy". There are a few session-manager extensions to research but I know that this one has many users and is highly-rated. It allows you to save Tabs and Bookmarks to named, datetime-stamped collections for later recall. I think you use the extension to manually load from among your saved sessions. This is separate from Google's sync'd and auto-load upon startup, and should provide added peace-of-mind and help you with your New Year's resolutions. Good luck!
[Note: While you did say "to your computer" in the previous question, the sync to google account setting does make a local-cache in the process of syncing your configured items to your google account in "the cloud". On Windows these are stored in [system-drive]\Users\userid\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome... I have actually restored a backup of that directory to successfully re-load a session that was several month's old. No guarantees with it since the internal representations may change across chrome versions, but provided the s/w hasn't changed it should remain compatible. This is not an advertised feature, obviously ;-)]