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Hi all,

One of my Orion profiles crashed recently. I sent in a crash report. I had about 100 tabs open with the vertical tab interface but none of them were restored (and there was nothing to "Reopen Last Window Closed"). So I lost them all.

This is where I got the inspiration to allow for recurring snapshots as backups.
If I had a snapshot of my profile's windows automatically taken hourly, for example, I would have restored 95% of what I lost.

Just an idea; it may be sparringly useful because we don't expect a crash like this often.

The scheduled recurring snapshots would be optional (assuming this is at all intensive).

  • Vlad replied to this.

    moorejs I hoped you are our first known snapshots users, but alas.. sorry about what happened. We have big plan for snapshots, including automatic snapshots, but the lack of general interest in snapshots as a concept is delaying that.

    btw you can periodically (via cron) backup pretty much all orion data including open tabs, bookmarks etc because they are just files on disk.

    Check out technical docs for more info

    https://help.kagi.com/orion/misc/technical.html#orion-macos

        Vlad I did have a snapshot that was about 10 days old, but the performance has been so excellent that I haven't felt the need to close out groups of windows or tabs or profiles...

        w.r.t. manual backups, I'm not familiar with grokking plists but I'm assuming the browsers_state.plist would be read-only? This would still help with disaster recovery, of course, with manual restortion.

        • Vlad replied to this.

            moorejs Oh so you are indeed our first (only?) known user of Snapshots. You need to be spreading the gospel more about it in our Discord 🙂

            plist is not read only, you can do whatever you want with them.

                For example, I already backup my Orion profile folder (amongst other things) to incremental snapshot backups several times per day, just in case of things like this. I'm not really a big "keeping tabs around" person, but that approach might work for you.

                Orion is super easy to work with - all the files are straightforward flat files (that I can think of) and you can copy or back them up - you could even do it using a bash script, which would just back up the entire Orion profile folder if you so choose.

                a year later

                I am curious if continuous snapshots are still on the roadmap?

                I've had Orion unexpectedly lose tabs repeatedly either due to crashes or due to me just closing the browser in the regular fashion. I find the windows feature amazing. It could in theory replace my entire bookmarking workflows. But the instability makes me afraid to use it. Continuous snapshots could help me gain confidence that I don't lose valuable tabs without the burden of manually snapshotting myself. If a similar thing happened in chrome it would ask me if I wanted to restore X browser tabs/windows after the crash.

                • Vlad replied to this.

                  I see. That's good to know. Although it's not quite the same as what I had in mind. When chrome crashes unexpectedly and is reopened it asks to restore all previously opened windows and tabs. In the language of orion that would also mean unnamed windows. As far as I know Chrome continuously saves the state of open tabs and windows in a session file. I guess that would be similar as continuously taking workspace snapshots in Orion?

                  • Vlad replied to this.
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