Safari tab groups lost after macOS update 26.2

This happened to me as well. There is a way to fully restore your tab groups if you've backed up your Mac using Time Machine.

Navigate to this directory in Finder (cmd + shift + g):

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/

This is where Safari stores its tab group metadata.

1. Quit Safari (and optionally disconnect from Wifi to prevent iCloud sync races)
2. Locate all files that have "Tabs" in the name and either delete them or, if you want to play it safe, move them to a different folder.
3. Enter Time Machine (you can launch it directly using Spotlight, just type "Time Machine")
4. Locate the first backup from before you updated your macOS 26.2
5. Select all the files with "Tabs" in the name
6. Restore the files
7. Re-launch Safari - you should see your tab groups back where they were before the OS update
8. If you turned off your Wifi, you can now turn it back on

There are three things that cause this issue:

1. A botched database migration in Safari
2. Complete inability to reset iCloud (CloudKit) storage for Safari
3. Lack of any support regarding the points above from Apple Support

The solution described above with TimeMachine lacks some crucial steps to make it stick:

Before turning wifi back on:

1. Open as many Safari windows as you have tab groups
2. Using the left pane, move all tabs for each tab group to each of the windows
3. If you have profiles, those are lost for good, but the tabs themselves can be moved to main profile while wifi is off
4. Remove tab groups
5. Enable wifi, enable cloud sync if needed
6. Wait till sync is complete (try creating some tab groups on another device. If they pop up sync is done)
7. Create tab groups and move tabs back to their tab groups

There are some complicated tricks to simplify this using sqlite commands in terminal, but this is probably the simplest way in general.

To add to this, it appears it is only necessary to restore the CloudTabs set of files (three on my machine) to get the tab groups back. I did not copy over the SafariTabs set and all my tab groups are back.

Nice job on that Tahoe update, Apple! You're doing a heckuva job, Timmy!

FWIW, similar problem with Tab Groups missing on Mac (15.7.3) after iOS update to 26.2. Restored them following vladinecko's guidance. Within minutes of turning wifi back on they were gone again. After several iterations turned off Safari synch to icloud and so far they're still there.

I’d like to add that updating one device to 26.2 (as I did this morning) is enough to overwrite all your Safari tabs on all synced devices, even if you have a device which is on an older OS (I have a late 2019 MacBook Pro which cannot run macOS 26). I do not have a Time Machine backup of the old ones - 11 different groups for different work and personal contexts - that are now all gone. (A reminder that even though I have moved all essential files to various kinds of cloud and offline backup, it seems Apple will find ways to make me need Time Machine again.) Incidentally, it doesn’t seem like iOS and iPadOS 26.2.1 fix this problem. I don’t know if updating Safari to 26.2 on a Mac running an older macOS is enough to do it.

From what I read here, there is no way to recover them. I could even see the old tabs when I woke my Mac where Safari was still open - but then they were erased without any option to avoid it. This could perhaps be avoided by turning off the iCloud sync on another device before opening the device with the old tabs, but it's not clear if that would work.

Of course, plenty of the pages are bookmarked, but not all of them - like many I suspect, I’d come to rely on them as a sort of short term working memory, since they were reliably synced. It will be a lot of work to reassemble some of those tab groups, but it doesn’t really feel worth the effort and the trust that they will be reliable is gone now.

Absolutely regret updating my iPhone and iPad, and this after I had waited for a couple of major updates to try and avoid exactly this kind of problem.

Same with me, I upgraded to 26.2 on all of my devices, Mac and iPhone and lost all except 1 tabgroup which wasn't even up to date.

I rang Apple support who told me that all of my settings for iCloud and Safari were correct and that it should have sync'd. I pointed out that I'd had many of these tab groups for many months and that they had been sync'd across my devices.

Apple said that there is never going to be any guarantee that tab groups won't just disappear. I asked whether there is a way for users to sync their tab groups manually and Apple said no, there is not. So this means that tab groups are completely unreliable, you might be lucky, you might not.

I think this is disgraceful.

Same issue. 26.2 is junk. I followed the workaround here, but as others have noted, shy of turning off iCloud sync (one of the reasons I love the Apple ecosystem is iCloud syncing across all my devices!), the wipe-out of tab groups comes back. The fix only seems to help my Mac, not iPhone nor iPad. Then they apparently sync and kill my Mac. You'd think sync would respect latest timestamp and update them from restore on Mac.

[Edited by Moderator]

Let me be a cautionary tale to others. Make sure your backup situation is solid. If you're not using Time Machine, make sure your online backup service is running and up to date. <Sigh>. I had something like 20 different tab groups for all the different facets of my life and kids' activities. Disappeared from my Mac but were still on my iPhone and would not sync back over. Tried creating a Safari profile and that caused them to disappear everywhere. So they're just gone now and nothing I can do about it except make sure I have good backups moving forward.

The same here, after Updating iPhone to IOS 26.2 the tab groups are gone there, as well on the iPad which is still on 18.7.3 … pretty surprising & annoying. Any idea, how to get the tab groups back?

It appears that Apple made sure you lose your tab groups one way or another. The fix still works, but after some time, my tab groups disappeared again. This is most likely due to a bad iCloud sync cycle. Needless to say, this is very frustrating and clearly a bug.

Thanks so much for this.

I was struggling trying to find lost tab groups on my iPad (manual update to iPadOS 26.2 overnight) when I saw this. Went to my MacBook and saw the same thing happened there (auto update overnight to 26.2). Followed these instructions and was able to get the tab groups back on the MacBook.

Now to find a solution to the iPad lost tab groups 🤞

What a cluster firetruck! Ugh!

FYI, for anyone looking for this path, I instead find it at ~/Library/Containers/Safari/Data/Library/Safari, but when I copy that as a pathname, it does indeed show up as ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari.

Even weirder, there are two identically named Safari folders in the Containers directory (the other shows up as ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Passwords-Settings.extension). The macOS Library is a hot mess (or maybe just a normal part of Tahoe).

Only problem with this plan is that most people who have the problem won't see this solution until they have the problem.

In my case, it was too late. In my husband's case, he only has an iPad and iPhone and can't do manual recovery, as described. I do wish Apple would:

1. Fix this
2. Own this

With all recent changes, Apple’s hardware and software reliability was the last reason to use it instead of Android and linux. 

And there at least you can plan and work around such stuff, having all the access you need to restore, fiddle and fix whatever’s bothering you. With such lack of quality control, Apple’s walledness becomes a really serious limitation.

For all the years I have used Firefox on Windows and Mac (that’s more than 15 years), there wasn’t a single time my tabs disappeared. Even after I went over to Safari and didn’t even open Firefox for 1-2 years, it still never dumped my tabs or settings after updates. And their budget is so much much lower than Apple, yet somehow they nailed it.

I use [a word I apparently can not mention on this forum] versions of macOS and iOS often, and it did happen to me 4 or 5 times already, but this is the second time it happens on the release version. What a disgrace.