Have you ever experienced a situation where you finished typing in text in a web form on the Internet only to find out that you could not post it on the website because of server timeouts, web browser crashes or other errors? Going back to that form usually results in it being blank. The only thing that can be done is to type the text anew and hope that it can be submitted this time.

Well, there is actually another option that is provided by the Lazarus Form Data Recovery extension for the Firefox web browser. Lazarus saves form data as soon as it is entered by the user in its SQLite database (lazarus.sqlite in the profile folder). This makes it possible to recover the form data when vising the page the form was on again.

There are obviously some privacy concerns which are handled excellently by the software program. It is for one possible to set a period (minute, hour, day, week) in which the form data is stored. Once the time is up the form data gets erased. Another security measure is that it is possible to create a password that has to be supplied once per browsing session before form data can be restored. The form data in the database is encrypted to prevent that users with local computer access can reveal the form information there directly.

The form data recovery add-on works by right-clicking the form on the Internet website. The user can then select the Recover Text or Recover Form entry to restore the text in that form.

Lazarus works nicely in the background and can be a real life safer for users who regularly post lots of text.