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[How to, Solved] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session - post extension removal from chrome webstore #1309

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kalpaj12 opened this issue Feb 4, 2021 · 29 comments

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@kalpaj12
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kalpaj12 commented Feb 4, 2021

Note: Only works if you have the deemed malware extension still installed.

Solution at #1309 (comment) and #1309 (comment). (Thanks @MartinHammarstedt and @icemanyu)

Post a success recovery:
If you wish to continue using TGS, the 7.1.6 could be a safe bet

@Beliar83
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Beliar83 commented Feb 4, 2021

I think #526 can help you there

@MCFreddie777
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MCFreddie777 commented Feb 4, 2021

Yeah, google removed it from store - due to its malicious code (#1263).
Moving on to alternative extension.

To answer your question, just search for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg in your history. Then open the link, and find the URL in the uri parameter of the address.
Source: #526 (comment)

@mookman288
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I installed an unpacked older version from 2019, and then recovered my tabs from a saved session I had made last month. I then removed the extension. I wasn't able to actually load the tabs because the extension remained blocked, but I was able to get all of the URLs manually.

@mike9k1
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mike9k1 commented Feb 4, 2021

I was warning people about the forced update back in May of last year -- #1147

I am hearing rumblings that the developer is being paid by a third party to integrate a closed-source library that tracks user data in the latest release, hence the intrusive "UPDATE NOW" push. I'll be removing this extension post-haste.

@MCFreddie777
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I was warning people about the forced update back in May of last year -- #1147

At that time, it was safe. It was the former developer who had maintained this repository at that time.

@mike9k1
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mike9k1 commented Feb 4, 2021

I was warning people about the forced update back in May of last year -- #1147

At that time, it was safe. It was the former developer who had maintained this repository at that time.

It wasn't though -- they were already integrating a closed-source library that tracks user data, hence pushing out extremely aggressive update notices. You can even tell from their pushback in that thread what they were up to.

@Ophinity
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Ophinity commented Feb 4, 2021

I installed an unpacked older version from 2019, and then recovered my tabs from a saved session I had made last month. I then removed the extension. I wasn't able to actually load the tabs because the extension remained blocked, but I was able to get all of the URLs manually.

How were you able to get to your saved session? I haven't been able to locate them after loading an unpacked version.

@di2mot
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di2mot commented Feb 4, 2021

October 2020 (10/28/2020) during a forced update, the app offered to save the session to a file, if you didn't delete it, you can restore from there. I did.

@wchristian
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the marvellous suspender appears to be a clean replacement and i documented an easy way to transition your session: gioxx#7

@RedAero
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RedAero commented Feb 4, 2021

Here's what I did:

  1. Load the unpacked extension, preferably the older version. Start it, run it, check that it works.
  2. Open the extension's settings page, go to Session management, open the current session, and export it. It'll export to a simple txt file with your tab URLs line-by-line.
  3. Open the text file and, using regex, remove the extension stuff leaving just the URL. Tip: ^(.*uri=)(.*)$
  4. You now have a list of your old tabs in a file. If you're posting to GitHub I have confidence that you can solve the issue of importing them into chrome in a number of ways, but if not, install a Chrome extension called "Open Multiple URLs", paste the list, Bob's your uncle.

@kalpaj12
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kalpaj12 commented Feb 4, 2021

Here's what I did:

  1. Load the unpacked extension, preferably the older version. Start it, run it, check that it works.
  2. Open the extension's settings page, go to Session management, open the current session, and export it. It'll export to a simple txt file with your tab URLs line-by-line.
  3. Open the text file and, using regex, remove the extension stuff leaving just the URL. Tip: ^(.*uri=)(.*)$
  4. You now have a list of your old tabs in a file. If you're posting to GitHub I have confidence that you can solve the issue of importing them into chrome in a number of ways, but if not, install a Chrome extension called "Open Multiple URLs", paste the list, Bob's your uncle.

this helps with current session, any way to recover saved session?

@RedAero
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RedAero commented Feb 4, 2021

Here's what I did:

  1. Load the unpacked extension, preferably the older version. Start it, run it, check that it works.
  2. Open the extension's settings page, go to Session management, open the current session, and export it. It'll export to a simple txt file with your tab URLs line-by-line.
  3. Open the text file and, using regex, remove the extension stuff leaving just the URL. Tip: ^(.*uri=)(.*)$
  4. You now have a list of your old tabs in a file. If you're posting to GitHub I have confidence that you can solve the issue of importing them into chrome in a number of ways, but if not, install a Chrome extension called "Open Multiple URLs", paste the list, Bob's your uncle.

this helps with current session, any way to recover saved session?

Ah... That's... a difficult one - I misread your question. Assuming you haven't yet entirely removed the extension, you have a theoretical chance of being able to extract it from some of the extension's local files (it has to be in there somewhere after all), or if you used that option, your google profile, but luckily for me I saved my sessions in a different, older extension.

Perhaps someone can dig into the code to find out how the storing of the session works and what it does with the data. It has to be somewhere in the chrome user data folder.

Perhaps this can be of assistance: https://superuser.com/questions/942392/how-can-i-modify-data-stored-by-chrome-extensions

@sudipkumarbhattacharya
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Check the url of the suspended tab. Don't click refresh, or the URL will be gone.
Edit the URL, and at the end of it, you will find the URL of the suspended tab.

For e.g. here is the URL text of a suspended tab:
chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#ttl=GitHub%20Learning%20Lab&pos=679&uri=https://lab.github.com/githubtraining/paths

At the end of the URL, you will see "uri=". Whatever comes after that, was your original URL. Copy that portion and then launch in a new tab.

@MartinHammarstedt
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I found that after restarting Chrome, The Great Suspender was temporarily enabled again, only to get automatically disabled after a minute or so. That gave me enough time to go into the settings of the extension and export any previous or saved sessions I wanted to keep, before uninstalling the extension for good.

@icemanyu
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icemanyu commented Feb 4, 2021

I found that after restarting Chrome, The Great Suspender was temporarily enabled again, only to get automatically disabled after a minute or so. That gave me enough time to go into the settings of the extension and export any previous or saved sessions I wanted to keep, before uninstalling the extension for good.

Successfully exported sessions I need, after temporarily disconnected internet and restarted Chrome.
(The history trick may take a lot of time for restoring hundreds of tabs, since the extension id need to be fixed)

@kalpaj12
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kalpaj12 commented Feb 4, 2021

@MartinHammarstedt and @icemanyu Thanks! exported all my saved sessions, whitelist, and a few other settings!

@kalpaj12 kalpaj12 changed the title [How to] recover saved session post extension removal from chrome webstore? [How to] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session post extension removal from chrome webstore Feb 4, 2021
@kalpaj12 kalpaj12 changed the title [How to] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session post extension removal from chrome webstore [How to] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session - post extension removal from chrome webstore Feb 4, 2021
@vgamesx1
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vgamesx1 commented Feb 4, 2021

I was less fortunate than many of you as I was too quick in removing the extension in favor of immediately reverting to the older version found on here, however I was able to recover everything using the history method, so thanks for that tip and I also noticed that you can replace the "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg" in the URL with the ID of the new extension which was much easier than finding the link.

@kalpaj12 kalpaj12 changed the title [How to] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session - post extension removal from chrome webstore [How to, Solved] recover whitelist, recent session, saved session - post extension removal from chrome webstore Feb 4, 2021
@sneheshs
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sneheshs commented Feb 4, 2021

I had some difficulty but I was able to use this chrome extension history-trends-unlimited and searched for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and exported the data. I know this is not ideal, but at least I have them now, and I can recover the tabs that I lost.

After exporting the data (.tsv file), I then wrote a python script to parse through it to recover the ones I wanted and get rid of the duplicates. That made it much more manageable. Thanks to all for the many helpful tips on this thread, was very helpful!

@andrewprofile
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#1313 :)

@Nubbie
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Nubbie commented Feb 4, 2021

Worked for me by:

  • Turning off internet
  • Activate the extension "The Great Expander" in Chrome again and go to -> Settings -> Session management -> Open and load
  • Remove the extension "The Great Expander"
  • Turn on internet

@Allen-Kwan
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Here's what I did:

  1. Load the unpacked extension, preferably the older version. Start it, run it, check that it works.
  2. Open the extension's settings page, go to Session management, open the current session, and export it. It'll export to a simple txt file with your tab URLs line-by-line.
  3. Open the text file and, using regex, remove the extension stuff leaving just the URL. Tip: ^(.*uri=)(.*)$
  4. You now have a list of your old tabs in a file. If you're posting to GitHub I have confidence that you can solve the issue of importing them into chrome in a number of ways, but if not, install a Chrome extension called "Open Multiple URLs", paste the list, Bob's your uncle.

A combo of Session Buddy and using "^(.*uri=)" let me save my URLs and preserve the window structure. Then I was able to reverse engineer it into an older version of The Great Suspender.

@rakitanc
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rakitanc commented Feb 5, 2021

I had some difficulty but I was able to use this chrome extension history-trends-unlimited and searched for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and exported the data. I know this is not ideal, but at least I have them now, and I can recover the tabs that I lost.

After exporting the data (.tsv file), I then wrote a python script to parse through it to recover the ones I wanted and get rid of the duplicates. That made it much more manageable. Thanks to all for the many helpful tips on this thread, was very helpful!

Hi there. Newbie here.

Can you please help with the python script method? I have installed the history trend unlimited extension and now don't know what to do further.

As this has the issue has gone more active in 24 hours now, but I got affected by it a week ago. Even create an issue. So someone could help. I did not expect this would happen and now all my saved session I saved over a year are gone

#1302

@sneheshs
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sneheshs commented Feb 5, 2021

I had some difficulty but I was able to use this chrome extension history-trends-unlimited and searched for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and exported the data. I know this is not ideal, but at least I have them now, and I can recover the tabs that I lost.
After exporting the data (.tsv file), I then wrote a python script to parse through it to recover the ones I wanted and get rid of the duplicates. That made it much more manageable. Thanks to all for the many helpful tips on this thread, was very helpful!

Hi there. Newbie here.

Can you please help with the python script method? I have installed the history trend unlimited extension and now don't know what to do further.

As this has the issue has gone more active in 24 hours now, but I got affected by it a week ago. Even create an issue. So someone could help. I did not expect this would happen and now all my saved session I saved over a year are gone

#1302

After running that extension and searching for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg, were you able to export the results into a tsv file? If so, I can share my script. You can modify it to whatever you want. Mine goes opens history.tsv, through the list and removed duplicates, and saves a .desktop files (ubuntu url shortcut file) in a results subfolder, for windows and mac it would be different extension and format but I didn't code that yet. I'm sure you can figure out from the code. It's basic python, nothing fancy. Good luck, hope this help!

Disclaimer: Please use at your own risk and review the code before using it. I made it for myself. Any bugs or unintended consequences are your own responsibility.

import pandas as pd
import datetime
import os

data = pd.read_csv('history.tsv', sep='\t', header=None)
data = data.drop_duplicates(subset=[0]) # filter by url only

data.columns = ['url', 'domain', 'notsure1', 'epochtime', 'datatime', 'notsure3', 'type', 'title']

# You can change this date if you have a range you want to filter down by
datetime_start = datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 1)
datetime_end = datetime.datetime(2021, 1, 31)

output_path = 'results/'
template = ['[Desktop Entry]', 'Encoding=UTF-8', 'Name=', 'Type=Link', 'URL=', 'Icon=text-html']

def create_shortcut(name, url):
    if not os.path.exists(output_path):
        os.system('mkdir ' + output_path)

    # 2 Name, 4 url
    f = open(output_path + name + '.desktop', 'w')
    count = 0
    for t in template:
        if count == 2:
            f.write(t + name + '\n')
        elif count == 4:
            f.write(t + url + '\n')
        else:
            f.write(t + '\n')
        count += 1
    f.close()

for i, j in data.iterrows():
    title = j['title']
    dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(j['datatime'], '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    url = j['url']
    url = url[url.rfind('&uri=')+5:]

    if datetime_start < dt < datetime_end:
        create_shortcut(title, url)

@rakitanc
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rakitanc commented Feb 7, 2021

I had some difficulty but I was able to use this chrome extension history-trends-unlimited and searched for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and exported the data. I know this is not ideal, but at least I have them now, and I can recover the tabs that I lost.
After exporting the data (.tsv file), I then wrote a python script to parse through it to recover the ones I wanted and get rid of the duplicates. That made it much more manageable. Thanks to all for the many helpful tips on this thread, was very helpful!

Hi there. Newbie here.
Can you please help with the python script method? I have installed the history trend unlimited extension and now don't know what to do further.
As this has the issue has gone more active in 24 hours now, but I got affected by it a week ago. Even create an issue. So someone could help. I did not expect this would happen and now all my saved session I saved over a year are gone
#1302

After running that extension and searching for klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg, were you able to export the results into a tsv file? If so, I can share my script. You can modify it to whatever you want. Mine goes opens history.tsv, through the list and removed duplicates, and saves a .desktop files (ubuntu url shortcut file) in a results subfolder, for windows and mac it would be different extension and format but I didn't code that yet. I'm sure you can figure out from the code. It's basic python, nothing fancy. Good luck, hope this help!

Disclaimer: Please use at your own risk and review the code before using it. I made it for myself. Any bugs or unintended consequences are your own responsibility.

import pandas as pd
import datetime
import os

data = pd.read_csv('history.tsv', sep='\t', header=None)
data = data.drop_duplicates(subset=[0]) # filter by url only

data.columns = ['url', 'domain', 'notsure1', 'epochtime', 'datatime', 'notsure3', 'type', 'title']

# You can change this date if you have a range you want to filter down by
datetime_start = datetime.datetime(2019, 1, 1)
datetime_end = datetime.datetime(2021, 1, 31)

output_path = 'results/'
template = ['[Desktop Entry]', 'Encoding=UTF-8', 'Name=', 'Type=Link', 'URL=', 'Icon=text-html']

def create_shortcut(name, url):
    if not os.path.exists(output_path):
        os.system('mkdir ' + output_path)

    # 2 Name, 4 url
    f = open(output_path + name + '.desktop', 'w')
    count = 0
    for t in template:
        if count == 2:
            f.write(t + name + '\n')
        elif count == 4:
            f.write(t + url + '\n')
        else:
            f.write(t + '\n')
        count += 1
    f.close()

for i, j in data.iterrows():
    title = j['title']
    dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(j['datatime'], '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    url = j['url']
    url = url[url.rfind('&uri=')+5:]

    if datetime_start < dt < datetime_end:
        create_shortcut(title, url)

Thanks so much for this. But I'm not at all familar with how to use the code as i don't have any backgorund in tech stuff.
If you can guide me how to use this. It would mean a world to me

@sneheshs
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sneheshs commented Feb 8, 2021

@rakitanc please install python first. Then copy the code into a file called filter.py and have your exported history.tsv file in the same folder at this script. Then in the command window if you have windows or terminal for mac or linux, navigate to do the same folder, use cd <full path name of your folder>, once you are there type py filter.py or python filter.py and it will create a new folder called results create shortcuts to your urls there. I am assuming it is Linux with .desktop file type and extension, in windows pretty sure it is something else, sorry dont have time to make windows version for you. You can google how to or ask for help with one of you programmer friends to modify my code. It should not be that hard. Hope this helps.

@sneheshs
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sneheshs commented Feb 8, 2021

@rakitanc please install python first. Then copy the code into a file called filter.py and have your exported history.tsv file in the same folder at this script. Then in the command window if you have windows or terminal for mac or linux, navigate to do the same folder, use cd <full path name of your folder>, once you are there type py filter.py or python filter.py and it will create a new folder called results create shortcuts to your urls there. I am assuming it is Linux with .desktop file type and extension, in windows pretty sure it is something else, sorry dont have time to make windows version for you. You can google how to or ask for help with one of you programmer friends to modify my code. It should not be that hard. Hope this helps.

or just click on all the links in the history-trends-unlimited extension after searching for the klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and save them as bookmark so you dont have to deal with my scripts.

@rakitanc
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rakitanc commented Feb 8, 2021

@rakitanc please install python first. Then copy the code into a file called [filter.py](http://filter.py) and have your exported history.tsv file in the same folder at this script. Then in the command window if you have windows or terminal for mac or linux, navigate to do the same folder, use cd <full path name of your folder>, once you are there type py [filter.py](http://filter.py) or python [filter.py](http://filter.py) and it will create a new folder called results create shortcuts to your urls there. I am assuming it is Linux with .desktop file type and extension, in windows pretty sure it is something else, sorry dont have time to make windows version for you. You can google how to or ask for help with one of you programmer friends to modify my code. It should not be that hard. Hope this helps.

or just click on all the links in the history-trends-unlimited extension after searching for the klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and save them as bookmark so you dont have to deal with my scripts.

Thanks so much for this. I'm using linux But new to it. I will definitely follow your instructions

But can the saved sessions be restored somehow because that's the most important for me right now as I have collected them for an over or so and now they are gone. I'm devastated by it.Ca't believe what just happened

@sneheshs
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sneheshs commented Feb 8, 2021

@rakitanc please install python first. Then copy the code into a file called [filter.py](http://filter.py) and have your exported history.tsv file in the same folder at this script. Then in the command window if you have windows or terminal for mac or linux, navigate to do the same folder, use cd <full path name of your folder>, once you are there type py [filter.py](http://filter.py) or python [filter.py](http://filter.py) and it will create a new folder called results create shortcuts to your urls there. I am assuming it is Linux with .desktop file type and extension, in windows pretty sure it is something else, sorry dont have time to make windows version for you. You can google how to or ask for help with one of you programmer friends to modify my code. It should not be that hard. Hope this helps.

or just click on all the links in the history-trends-unlimited extension after searching for the klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg and save them as bookmark so you dont have to deal with my scripts.

Thanks so much for this. I'm using linux But new to it. I will definitely follow your instructions

But can the saved sessions be restored somehow because that's the most important for me right now as I have collected them for an over or so and now they are gone. I'm devastated by it.Ca't believe what just happened

No idea. If you chrome history has it, you should be able to recover it. If they are saved session, I am not sure. Try it and let us all know if that worked for you. good luck

@sanbis1983
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Worked for me by:

  • Turning off internet
  • Activate the extension "The Great Expander" in Chrome again and go to -> Settings -> Session management -> Open and load
  • Remove the extension "The Great Expander"
  • Turn on internet

I have tried this action
But after opening chrome, The Great Suspender still shows a prohibited state

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