You close a window by accident, Chrome updates, or your laptop dies mid-research. Forty tabs are gone. Here are five ways to make sure that never costs you anything, from simplest to most robust.
1. Bookmark all tabs (built in)
Press Ctrl+Shift+D (Cmd+Shift+D on Mac) and Chrome saves every tab in the window into one bookmarks folder.
Good for: a one-off archive. Weak spot: it saves URLs only. Tab group names, colors and pinned state are not restored, and a bookmarks folder is a clumsy place to keep work-in-progress.
2. Continue where you left off (built in)
In Settings → On startup, choose Continue where you left off. Chrome reopens your last windows after a restart.
Good for: surviving reboots. Weak spot: it only remembers the last state. Once you've closed a window and started something new, the old session is gone.
3. Saved tab groups (built in)
Right-click a tab group and choose Save group. Saved groups can sync across devices through your Google account.
Good for: keeping a handful of project groups. Weak spot: it works group by group, so tabs outside a group aren't covered, and there's no snapshot of a whole window at a point in time.
4. A session manager extension
A session manager saves an entire window as a named session you can restore in one click. Look for these features, because they're what separates a real tool from a link dump:
- Tab group preservation: titles, colors and collapsed state come back exactly as they were.
- Automatic snapshots: a manager that only saves when you remember to click protects you from nothing.
- Recovery for closed windows, for the "I just closed the wrong one" moment.
- A local copy of your data, so a sync problem can't take it with it.
KeepIt does all four. Press Alt+Shift+S (Cmd+Shift+S on Mac) and the current window is saved without even opening the popup. If you're coming from OneTab, you can import your exported list too.
5. Export to Markdown
If you want your tabs in a note, wiki or ticket, copy the session as Markdown: a clean list of titles and links you can paste anywhere. KeepIt has a one-click Copy Session as Markdown button on every saved session.
Which method should you use?
| If you want... | Use |
|---|---|
| A quick archive today | Bookmark all tabs |
| Survive restarts | Continue where you left off |
| A few synced project groups | Saved tab groups |
| Many sessions, crash protection, groups intact | A session manager |
| Tabs inside a note or ticket | Markdown export |
Most people end up combining two: Chrome's built-ins as the floor, and a session manager as the safety net. The best time to set it up is before you lose something.