Keepsake Tabs
Guide
OneTab and Session Buddy alternative with automatic snapshots
OneTab and Session Buddy are the best-known tab savers, and both do their main job well. The complaints people search for are almost always about one thing: a saved list or session that is suddenly gone. Before you pick a tool, it helps to know where that risk comes from.
How they work
- OneTab turns your open tabs into a list of links and closes them, which frees memory. The list lives in the extension's own storage.
- Session Buddy saves your open windows and tabs as sessions you can reopen. Its version 3 stopped working with Chrome 124 (May 2024), and users had to upgrade to version 4 to keep their data.
Where saved tabs get lost
- Anything stored only inside an extension goes away with that extension's data: a removed extension, a reset profile, a broken update or a new computer.
- Saving is manual in many tools: if you didn't save before the crash, there is nothing to restore.
- A plain list of links loses your tab groups, their names and colours, and which window each tab was in.
What to look for
- Automatic snapshots, so a crash doesn't depend on you having clicked Save.
- Export to a file you keep outside the browser.
- Tab groups kept intact, with names and colours.
- Import from what you use now, so you don't start from zero.
Whatever you use, export a backup today: OneTab and Session Buddy both have an export option.