I lost all my Safari browser tabs

Today I lost all my > 100 Safari tabs on my iPhone. I’m still blown away by this. I didn’t think something like this is still possible. It looks like it’s an iCloud sync issue. On reddit people mention that it’s possible to restore the tabs by closing Safari or even restarting the phone. Since I didn’t grasp immediately what was happening I opened a new tab, thus, overwriting the Safari iCloud tabs state. The Safari history also doesn’t let me reopen all my tabs that I have recently closed. This is something you can do with Chrome tabs.

This definitely threw me off. On one hand, this is an unacceptable behavior. There must be some fallback mechanism to prevent this and / or to restore my tabs. I store a lot of stuff in my tabs that I need later or want to use at some point. I think this is a problem many people face: growing a stack of tabs that they never look at even once. This brings me to my second point. On the other hand, this somehow gave me some relief. I now start again with an empty list of tabs. I can only remember of two or three tabs of the 200+ tabs that I really wished I still knew since I wanted to read them. The rest of all those tabs are now lost and soon to be forgotten.

Once again, I wished I’d stored my tabs somewhere on my computer - away from the cloud. What’s the reason for a (i)Cloud if you can lose your stuff irrevocably?