Have you ever filled in a text area or form in a webpage and something happens before you can finish it? If you like the idea of recovering that lost data then you will want to have a look at the Lazarus: Form Recovery extension for Firefox.

Lazarus: Form Recovery in Action

For our first example we chose the comment text box area for one of the articles here at the website. As you can see we were not finished typing in the whole comment yet… Notice the “Lazarus Icon” in the lower right corner.

Note: We simulated accidental tab closures for our two examples.

After getting our webpage opened up again all of our text was gone. Right clicking within the text area showed two options available…”Recover Text & Recover Form”. Notice that our lost text was listed as a “sub menu”…this could be extremely useful in matching up the appropriate text to the correct webpage if you had multiple tabs open before something happened. Click on the correct text listing to insert it.

So easy to finish writing our comment without having to start from zero again.

In our second example we chose the sign-up form page for the website. As before we were not finished filling in the form…

Getting the webpage opened back up showed the same problem as before…all the entered text was lost. This time we right clicked in the browser window area and there was that wonderful “Recover Form Command” waiting to be used. One click and…

All of our lost form data was back and we were able to finish filling in the form.

For those who may be interested you can disable Lazarus: Form Recovery on individual websites using the “Context Menu” for the “Status Bar Icon”

Options

There are three sections in the options and you should take a quick look through them to make any desired modifications in how Lazarus: Form Recovery functions. The first “Options Area” focuses on display/access for the extension.

The second “Options Area” allows you to expand the type of data retained, enable removal of data within a given time frame, set up a password, disable search indexing, and enable form data retention while in “Private Browsing Mode”.

The third “Options Area” focuses on the Lazarus database itself.

Conclusion

If you have ever lost text area or form data before then you know how much time could be lost in starting over. Lazarus: Form Recovery helps provide a nice backup solution to get you up and running once again with a minimum of effort.

Links

Download the Lazarus: Form Recovery extension (Mozilla Add-ons)