Backstop — Session Manager with Real Backup

Save and restore tab sessions as versioned local snapshots, verified on write, so a crash or update costs you nothing.

Fifty tabs open across three windows, mid-research or mid-shopping-list, and then Chrome crashes, an update forces a restart, or a profile gets reset. Backstop exists so that moment costs you nothing. Backstop is a tab and session manager for Chrome. Save your open windows and tabs as a snapshot whenever you want, or let Backstop take one automatically. Every snapshot is written under its own key and never overwritten, so a bad save can only fail to add a new snapshot — it can never corrupt one you already have. After every write, Backstop reads the snapshot back and checks it against a checksum before the snapshot list is allowed to reference it; if a checksum doesn't match, you're told, not silently handed a broken restore later. If Chrome's storage fills up, Backstop reports it and stops. It will not free space by quietly deleting your history — that would defeat the point of a backup tool. Restoring reopens the windows and tabs from a chosen snapshot. If a tab from that snapshot can't be reopened, Backstop tells you which one and why, instead of reporting a clean restore that wasn't. Free includes manual save and restore, automatic snapshots (the last 10 kept), and plain JSON export and import — ordinary text, readable, diffable, and yours whether or not Backstop is installed. That plain export is free for the life of the product, on principle: a backup tool that locks your own data behind a paywall would be exactly the failure this extension exists to avoid. Backstop Pro is a one-time purchase for people who lean on this daily. It extends automatic history from 10 snapshots to 200, adds encrypted export (AES-256-GCM, with a passphrase only you know), and adds search across your whole snapshot history. Pro does not add or remove access to anything Free already does — it adds depth and room. Everything Backstop saves stays on your machine, in Chrome's own local extension storage. There is no Backstop server. Nothing is uploaded, synced, or analyzed — no analytics, no telemetry, no tracking of any kind. A Pro licence key is checked entirely offline using a cryptographic signature; the extension never contacts a server to validate a purchase, at activation or afterward. Backstop asks for four permissions and no others. Tabs, to read the titles and URLs of your open tabs when you save and to reopen them when you restore. Storage and unlimitedStorage, to keep snapshot history in Chrome's local storage without hitting the default size cap. Alarms, to run automatic snapshots on a schedule. It requests no host permissions, so it cannot read the content of the pages you visit — only the browser's own record of which tabs and windows are open. Requires Chrome 116 or later. Backstop Pro ($12, one-time) is sold separately from https://smallhours.works/backstop through Paddle as merchant of record. Privacy policy: https://smallhours.works/backstop/privacy. Support: hello@smallhours.works.