Home / Current set of open documents in tab disapeared

Hello

I use to have multiple pdf documents open in a number of tabs. When I close Sumatra and later I use it again,
I usually find all my tabs open and can continue to read what ever doc I had opened.

But sometimes it happens that all of these tabs disapeared, leaving only history preview of docs that will be changed each time I open a pdf & limited history of recent files used.

1 - Is there a way to re open all of these tabs ? I mean at least the list of pdf docs I had open ?
2 - is there a way to prevent such thing to happen ?

details: I was using Sumatra portable. + I think it was the use of ccleaner that deleted & closed all the tab & doc that were open. but I’m not sur.

3 - if I change to Sumatra installer version, will this continue to happen or is it the solution ?

Thank you

There were more frequent “lost history” problems in the past which recent prerelease improves.

The file history list is held in Sumatrapdf-settings.txt in the portable folder (not where cleaner should be looking) so back-up by copying the file.

It should not matter if installed or not. The history on failure, is just as likely to be blanked in either location.

You asked can you restore the history of open tabs. Unfortunately once the tab history is forgotten then the list of all previous opened is of little use.

Here is a possible trick when there is no tab history. to quickly open a desired set of files, but dont let anyone know I told you this (totally unsupported).

So replace any existing blank
SessionData [
]
at the end of the file like this above the lowest line that starts

TimeOfLastUpdateCheck = ...

The brackets must be exactly as shown

SessionData [
[
TabStates [
[
FilePath = C:\Down loads\File 1.pdf
][
FilePath = C:\Down loads\File 2.pdf
...
][
FilePath = C:\Down loads\File 3.pdf
...
][
FilePath = C:\Down loads\File 4.pdf
...
]]
]]

In theory there should be at least 2 files (however even one will work) you do not need the … they are there to guide you with extra entries and the full set must end with those last two identical rows, note dont worry about indents, they will all be later updated once you alter a tab.

By default they will all initially open to page 1 so if you wish to force the start page do it like so
…
][
FilePath = C:\Down loads\File 3.pdf
PageNo = 2
…

this makes much sense
thank you very much for your help

Is this the right place for a bug report ?
What happens is this, if I close Sumatra BEFORE closing XP, when reopening Sumatra it re-reads all the files that were opened.
If Sumatra is open, and I shut down XP, after a reboot Sumatra doesn’t open any files.

SumatraPDF in order to run quickly without disk thrashing keeps many settings in memory then saves them to the disk based settings file when it is closed cleanly rather than aborted.
To avoid issues of premature closure, there have been some changes included in more recent pre-release builds to flush settings during tab changes. That helps in some cases when Windows 10 decides to reboot for updates.

Since XP is not supported by newer pre-release those changes are not much use to a 3.1.2 user and the best solution there is to “old school”, manually exit and save an important customised collection of tab settings.