Recover Form Data in Firefox and Chrome with Lazarus
One of the most annoying things about the Web is its uncanny ability to stop working right after you have spent five or more minutes filling out a long form with contact information and other data.
It never fails—you go to apply for a job, so you enter your entire resume and a glowing cover letter in a long data form, hit the send button and hold your breath as the little progress bar slowly moves the right…only to grace you with the page cannot be found error.
For Firefox and Chrome users, this common occurrence need not ruin your day. A miraculous add-on, aptly called Lazarus, can recover all form data with a simple right click.
Ok, so it’s not exactly a rising-from-the-tomb-after-being-dead-four-days kind of miracle, but Lazarus does auto-save all data typed into Web forms when it is installed in a compatible browser. Once installed, it sits on the right of the address bar, patiently waiting for a form to crash.
When you lose data from a form, you can go back to the form, right click in the data boxes, and choose from several of Lazarus’ autosaves from that particular form. In our test, we wrote in a form, backspaced one word and right-clicked in the form. Lazarus gives us the option to restore the word we backspaced:
In Firefox, the program works flawlessly. At one point, we even unplugged our router after filling in a form, then hit the submit button. Of course, the page timed out. To make sure Lazarus worked as described, we then restarted the computer. When we reconnected to the internet and navigated back to the form, the data was easily recovered with Lazarus.
The Chrome version of Lazarus is still in Beta testing. It works well with data forms, but it would not work to recover any of the residual dropdown menus or selection boxes. Hopefully these will work when the program emerges from Beta.
Lazarus for Firefox is available from Interclue’s Web site. Lazarus for Chrome is available from the Chrome Extensions Page. There are no plans to launch an add-on for Internet Explorer in the near future.
It never fails—you go to apply for a job, so you enter your entire resume and a glowing cover letter in a long data form, hit the send button and hold your breath as the little progress bar slowly moves the right…only to grace you with the page cannot be found error.
For Firefox and Chrome users, this common occurrence need not ruin your day. A miraculous add-on, aptly called Lazarus, can recover all form data with a simple right click.
Ok, so it’s not exactly a rising-from-the-tomb-after-being-dead-four-days kind of miracle, but Lazarus does auto-save all data typed into Web forms when it is installed in a compatible browser. Once installed, it sits on the right of the address bar, patiently waiting for a form to crash.
When you lose data from a form, you can go back to the form, right click in the data boxes, and choose from several of Lazarus’ autosaves from that particular form. In our test, we wrote in a form, backspaced one word and right-clicked in the form. Lazarus gives us the option to restore the word we backspaced:
In Firefox, the program works flawlessly. At one point, we even unplugged our router after filling in a form, then hit the submit button. Of course, the page timed out. To make sure Lazarus worked as described, we then restarted the computer. When we reconnected to the internet and navigated back to the form, the data was easily recovered with Lazarus.
The Chrome version of Lazarus is still in Beta testing. It works well with data forms, but it would not work to recover any of the residual dropdown menus or selection boxes. Hopefully these will work when the program emerges from Beta.
Lazarus for Firefox is available from Interclue’s Web site. Lazarus for Chrome is available from the Chrome Extensions Page. There are no plans to launch an add-on for Internet Explorer in the near future.
