u/GrantExploit

(While this isn't exactly about Windows specifically, Microsoft Edge is an integral part of Windows 11 and I am using Windows 11, so I hope this will be accepted...)

Basically the title. For material context, I am currently using an ASUS TUF Gaming A16 FA608UM with an AMD Ryzen 7 260 processor with Radeon 780M Graphics at a nominal 3.8 GHz, 32 GB of system RAM (of which 31.3 GB is usable), an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU with 16 GB of VRAM, the 2560 × 1600 display, and an SSD advertised as 1 TB; currently running Windows 11 Home version 25H2, build 26200.8246 on its internal drive.

I restarted the computer around 18:00 United States Eastern Time at 2026-05-19 to clear the browser session from RAM (it was getting oddly slow for its tab load {performing how it would if it had, say... 700 more tabs}, so I figured that it would be more sprightly if I restarted the session) and to prepare the computer to perform an experiment regarding the nature of OneDrive syncs related to a previous technical question.†

Honestly, while I don't remember recently voluntarily restarting a computer with Microsoft Edge open before this incident, it recovers from forcible restarts (due to updates or system crashes), app crashes, and being killed with the Task Manager almost flawlessly. And on another Windows 10 computer where Mozilla Firefox was/is my primary browser, I did frequently voluntarily restart the computer with it open, and Firefox recovered almost flawlessly from that and all those other scenarios, too. As such, I thought it would be safe to restart my computer with Microsoft Edge open.

The browser was reopened right after 01:00 United States Eastern Time at 2026-05-20. The only thing I did after that on Edge was to open the history page proper to confirm the absence of a recovery option, which may have been a mistake. (The history list was all there, BTW, just not any of the windows in "Recently Closed".) I am currently using LibreWolf (version 144.0-1, which I recognize is an old version, but ehh) instead of Edge.

Immediately after this, I used a portable install of DMDE 4.0.6 to copy over everything remotely approaching a resemblance to an Edge session file over to an external drive. The program, a data recovery utility, can preserve metadata exactly, unlike conventional Windows Explorer copies and even going beyond robocopy's capabilities. In the session files, I was able to identify a "Session_[long number]" file of ~40 MB dated to right before the restart, and a "Tabs_[long number]" file of ~350 KB dated to about a day before.

And so, the question. I really would like to recover my session (or at least a good approximation of it), considering the fact that it had a totally reasonable... I dunno, 5,000 tabs or so? Thank you.

†I temporarily paused OneDrive syncing for 2 hours and within that time created a subfolder within a OneDrive-synced folder (loading it up with boilerplate contents) to verify someone's statement that the "Date modified" of OneDrive-synced subfolders created/modified within OneDrive sync pauses is changed to when they were synced afterwards, which (unfortunately for my goals) did verify.

Basically the title. For material context, I am currently using an ASUS TUF Gaming A16 FA608UM with an AMD Ryzen 7 260 processor with Radeon 780M Graphics at a nominal 3.8 GHz, 32 GB of system RAM (of which 31.3 GB is usable), an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU with 16 GB of VRAM, the 2560 × 1600 display, and an SSD advertised as 1 TB; currently running Windows 11 Home version 25H2, build 26200.8246 on its internal drive.

I restarted the computer around 18:00 United States Eastern Time at 2026-05-19 to clear the browser session from RAM (it was getting oddly slow for its tab load {performing how it would if it had, say... 700 more tabs}, so I figured that it would be more sprightly if I restarted the session) and to prepare the computer to perform an experiment regarding the nature of OneDrive syncs related to a previous technical question.†

Honestly, while I don't remember recently voluntarily restarting a computer with Microsoft Edge open before this incident, it recovers from forcible restarts (due to updates or system crashes), app crashes, and being killed with the Task Manager almost flawlessly. And on another Windows 10 computer where Mozilla Firefox was/is my primary browser, I did frequently voluntarily restart the computer with it open, and Firefox recovered almost flawlessly from that and all those other scenarios, too. As such, I thought it would be safe to restart my computer with Microsoft Edge open.

The browser was reopened right after 01:00 United States Eastern Time at 2026-05-20. The only thing I did after that on Edge was to open the history page proper to confirm the absence of a recovery option, which may have been a mistake. (The history list was all there, BTW, just not any of the windows in "Recently Closed".) I am currently using LibreWolf (version 144.0-1, which I recognize is an old version, but ehh) instead of Edge.

Immediately after this, I used a portable install of DMDE 4.0.6 to copy over everything remotely approaching a resemblance to an Edge session file over to an external drive. The program, a data recovery utility, can preserve metadata exactly, unlike conventional Windows Explorer copies and even going beyond robocopy's capabilities. In the session files, I was able to identify a "Session_[long number]" file of ~40 MB dated to right before the restart, and a "Tabs_[long number]" file of ~350 KB dated to about a day before.

And so, the question. I really would like to recover my session (or at least a good approximation of it), considering the fact that it had a totally reasonable... I dunno, 5,000 tabs or so? Thank you.

†I temporarily paused OneDrive syncing for 2 hours and within that time created a subfolder within a OneDrive-synced folder (loading it up with boilerplate contents) to verify someone's statement that the "Date modified" of OneDrive-synced subfolders created/modified within OneDrive sync pauses is changed to when they were synced afterwards, which (unfortunately for my goals) did verify.

At several times in the past, I have been fascinated by the idea of a planet with freshwater oceans, considering freshwater's generally more clement nature; it's (theoretically) drinkable and usable by general plant life (which would allow coastal desert civilizations to just scoop it up for irrigation or personal use), doesn't sting your eyes if you swim in it or leave a sticky residue when you dry off, doesn't leave behind inhospitable mineral crusts when it evaporates, and is much less corrosive. With properly-adapted oceanic life, about the only non-climatic/physical-oceanographic drawback of lower oceanic salt levels I can think of would be that pre-modern peoples would have a harder time preserving food and extracting dissolved minerals from the ocean in modern times would be more difficult, though at least for the latter that would heavily depend on what salts are removed. As a result, I've considered the idea for several of my worldbuilding projects, and have even imagined a highly-technologically advanced human civilization mass-genetically-engineering our ocean life to tolerate it and—armed with terraforming mass-removal techniques to send the salt to some dump like Mercury or Ceres or whatever—desalinating Earth's oceans.

I was recently re-inspired to think about this by u/monaclebandit's post on r/AskScienceDiscussion "Freshwater oceans?". While the OP and commenters focused on biological and geochemical effects, I'm interested in the climatological effects.

Of course, it would be unlikely for a planet to naturally possess truly freshwater oceans—Earth's oceans are salty due to an equilibrium between salt addition through mineral erosion from runoff and sea currents and salt sequestration through plate tectonics and other factors—but a planet with a different equilibrium might plausibly support brackish oceans with characteristics much more similar to that of freshwater, and as I had considered in the past and was mentioned in a comment chain on that post by u/Simon_Drake, life may evolve to sequester sodium (and magnesium?) salts as relatively-insoluble minerals like they do calcium species (though a plausible sodium sink is difficult to identify).

So... there are several factors that would be significant here, including these:

1. (Pure) freshwater, of course, freezes at 0 °C, while typical ocean water (on present Earth IRL) freezes at around -2 °C. However, the ice resulting from the freezing of either water type melts at around 0 °C, due to the exclusion of salt from ice during the freezing process. The higher freezing point (leading to ice forming in warmer conditions) and symmetrical freezing-melting response (no more or far less conditions where ice can't form but it also can't melt) at an oceanic scale would doubtlessly affect the climate.
2. Differences in salinity may be similar in relative terms with fresher oceans, but lesser in absolute terms. As water becomes denser as its salinity increases, the haline component of the thermohaline circulation would be far less important in a planet with near-freshwater oceans.
3. Perhaps most importantly, below a critical temperature (4 °C for pure water), fresh water decreases in density with decreasing temperature, while salt water acts like almost all other liquids and continues increasing with density. This is true up to a salinity of about 24.7 parts per thousand (source), which IMO should be generally considered as the threshold between brackish and properly saline water. This has the effect of suppressing subsidence and thus convection near the freezing point (this effect increasing as salinity decreases, even before this threshold is reached), potentially encouraging freezing in cool climates, thus increasing albedo and leading to a feedback cycle in favor of even colder conditions. Indeed, this is apparently evident in the climates surrounding the more northern of the nominative North American Great Lakes and other lakes of great magnitude in polar, boreal, and hemiboreal regions; as well as that around brackish water bodies in those regions like the Gulf of Ob, the Baltic Sea, and the Hudson Bay. Still, the insulative effect of the ice combined with the stagnation of the water column may help to stem some heat loss, partly countering the albedo effect.

And so, the question.

...

Ideally, I'd like to run or have someone run a dynamic-ocean GCM of Earth with freshwater oceans (actually, say... 0.16% salt, to make most ocean water still usable for irrigation {and drinking, though regulatory officials may disagree} yet keep it somewhat geologically plausible for a planet to have) yet similar initial conditions, but that seems to be much easier said than done: GCMs with dynamic ocean models are very computationally expensive (largely due to the time needed for equilibration) and difficult to set up, I'm not sure how many of them would play well with tweaking salinity to that extent, I'm also not sure if how easy it would be to insert existing atmospheric and physical-oceanographic states as inputs to those models (which would yield the most "accurate" results and reduce equilibration time, though for the latter probably only slightly in this case), and the fairly computationally-inexpensive and easy-to-use model ROCKE-3D doesn't include parameterizations for water motion through narrow straits and is thus apparently forced to (usually) use simplified topographies.

Of course, I'm aware that if this were to happen at once a deo (without any other divine changes), at least a large fraction of a meter of extra sea ice would immediately condense in winter polar regions due to the shallow ocean being below freshwater's freezing point, and the sea level may also rise several meters... but ehh.