Session Recovery

Status: Draft Author: Ryan Nel Date: 2026-05-01

Problem

When a user accidentally closes the browser tab during a live recording, the session ends permanently. Post-meeting processing runs on whatever audio reached GCS up to that point. The OPFS shadow buffer — which captures every audio chunk locally — persists beyond tab close, but there is no mechanism to resume the session from it. The audio data is still on the device; the session state is not. Users who lose a tab to a browser crash, an accidental close, or a system restart lose their live session even though the audio was never lost.

Appetite

2–3 weeks. The solution requires persisting session state (not just audio) to survive tab closure, a recovery detection flow on page load, and careful handling of the gap between where GCS left off and where OPFS continued. The OPFS infrastructure already exists — this extends it from audio-only resilience to full session resilience.

Why Now

Meeting Recording documents this as a known design decision: "Session not resumable after tab close (v1)." The OPFS buffer already captures the audio — the gap is session state persistence. As recordings get longer and more valuable, accidental tab closure becomes a more painful data loss vector. This should follow shortly after the initial recording release.