How can I preserve 150 tabs open in case my iMac crashes?

[Turnpike]

I work 10+ hours a day on an iMac, and often have 150+ tabs open, with groups of 10 or so on a particular subject that I follow up on every other day when I get some info back again... I do research and price tracking, and the only way to keep a subject on hold to come back to is to leave the group of tabs open until I have a result I am waiting for.

My last iMac crashed without warning, and now I can barely walk I have so many spare parachutes on- it always takes a disaster for people to learn about backups like they should. I learned and use Time Machine now, paper notes, all kinds of things. Is there a program, or something on Time Machine where the exact status of a computer (including pages open, tabs, cookies, everything) is updated and saved every 30 minutes or so?

Even if it's a paid app that's fine. Maybe even Time Machine can do it but I can't see anything in settings. Sometimes a batch of pages and figures take 5+hours to find and loosing them ends up costing way more than 5 hours of research, especially when things are time sensitive. Anything (and any price) that's a solution, I'm open to it.

Thanks!

 

[Pakaku]

Firefox has pinned tabs, maybe Safari does as well. But you should really consider using bookmarks more often, or placing them into bookmark folders to make it easier to launch related bookmarks in bulk

 

[ipaqrat]

You didn't mention your browser of choice, though I'm not sure that makes a difference. Safari, Chrome and Edge-Chrome, behave similarly enough in this regard:

Tab Groups and Pinning Tabs. In my experience those are saved to some sort of durable setting that survives Quit/Restart/Crash conditions.

This will require a second or two of attention to add te tab to a group, and or Pin it. I got the hang of it pretty quick.

Without acting to preserve the tabs/sets, there's nothing for a backup program, such as TimeMachine, to save.

 

[tristinDLC]

This is a bit more of an advanced option, but what I do is I have an Alfred workflow that queries all the open tabs in Chrome, nicely formats the results, and then creates a new task in OmniFocus with all the URLs set up in the task's note section. I now have an official task in OF to maintain visibility on what all my last URLs were.

I already use Alfred and OmniFocus though, so that's not a huge deal setting that up. In your case, that is very overkill. Conceptually the same, but using built-in native options, I would create a macOS shortcut that runs an AppleScript to query all your open browser windows and their tabs, then format the results, and then pipe that into a new Notes.app note. You can then view and/or visit all your URLs from your MacBook or iPhone just through Notes.

 

[tristinDLC]

Also, let me know if you need help with the proper AppleScript or even the whole shortcut. Happy to help get you set up as my daily workflow has me keeping a massive amount of tabs constantly open, so I really feel your pain about losing them on a crash.

 

[owidhh]

Doesn't even browser have an option to restore open tabs on startup? Safari does, so does Firefox. No need to mess around with pinned tabs or tab groups, although in Safari's case the tab groups are slightly more persistent in my experience + synced between devices. And they're named, which makes it easy to organize topics.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

In Safari, Bookmarks window > Add Bookmark for x open tabs

I'm sure other browsers have similar options.

 

[nottorp]

Doesn't even browser have an option to restore open tabs on startup? Safari does, so does Firefox. No need to mess around with pinned tabs or tab groups, although in Safari's case the tab groups are slightly more persistent in my experience + synced between devices. And they're named, which makes it easy to organize topics.

Yeah, I also have 100+ tabs grouped in windows per-project (in Firefox) and I don't bother with any saving/management. They just always come back.

Haven't had hardware go bad in quite some time though.