Firefox just crashed really hard. It has been doing so a lot lately, but not as much as it had been. I’ve been submitting error reports judiciously all whilst meaning to switch to Chrome for years. Anyhow, this time, Firefox biffed hard. Normally when it crashes, the program will apologize, give me a list of the pages it stored before the crash, and I can choose which to load. Included amongst those are a set of 10 or to that I have pinned for use in my job. This time, nothing loaded: no list, no dialog, no pins, no bookmarks, no history. Nothing. Nada, zilch. So I did some digging.
Turns out a profile file had been corrupted. I quit firefox and tried to backup my profiles by copying:
~/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xjsvpfy0.default/ (your file before the .default extension may be named differently)
but it kept erroring saying that file “places.sqlite-wal” wasn’t readable or writeable.
I then tried to duplicate the file through finder only to see that the file had indeed been duplicate several times, assuming from the times I tried to duplicate the directory.
I moved a copy of the places.sqlite-wal file outside of the xjsvpfy0.default directory and deleted the original places.sqlite-wal file, then restarted firefox.
Voila! The dialog listing the last tabs I had open. Then I used bookmark all to save the pins as a group and exported the bookmarks for safekeeping. Oof, what a night. Was not expecting this.