Lost open tabs from Samsung S21 Ultra Android

Question

Lost open tabs from Samsung S21 Ultra Android. I has about 98 open tabs I truly need for work and stuff and lost them all after I uninstalled and reinstalled chrome on my S21 Ultra. These tabs appear under my google chrome sync data but I cant seem to get them on any device, therefore I think they might be in some folders in the protected data folder of my device.

However I'm not sure how to access this folder as my phone is not rooted. I tried accessing the folder by doing an adb backup of my device through USB debugging but I cant seem to back up the folder. I am assuming the file are locally on the device on one of these locations: DATA → select com.android.chrome. And some other locations I read about online are:

The first folder to check is app_tabs, then 0. In this folder there should be a file called tab_state which contains a list of all your current tabs. There are also other files in this folder called tab3, tab4, etc. that contain info about current tabs. IMO, you need a special "text editor / sql editor" to read the content of some of these files as the encoding is different.

Next place to look is /data/com.android.chrome/app_chrome/Default/. In this folder you'll find a file called History. Depending on your situation, you may find a good list of recent site visits here. Finally, navigate to the Sync Data folder.

The question is does anyone know how to access this files and folders? Or do you have any other solution you may think off?

Answer 1

I had this same question as chrome recently closed half my open tabs (1000s) whereby the data chrome reported halved from 8GB to 4GB.

You need root access however root will invariably wipe all your data, so unfortunately there's no means to non-destructively root your phone for the purpose of data recovery. The recovery can only happen if you had a rooted phone to begin with.