Form ReDraft vs Lazarus: Which Form Recovery Tool Should You Use?

If you lost text and went looking for help, you probably met Lazarus first. It was the name everyone knew for more than a decade. Typio was the other one. Both are gone from the Chrome Web Store in their original form, and what replaced them is a small crowd of forks and newcomers with similar names and very different behaviour.

This is a direct comparison of the tools people actually install now: Lazarus, Typio Form Recovery Reboot, Form Recover, Form History Control II and Form ReDraft. No ranked list with a winner at the top, just what each one does and where each one falls short.

The short answer

If you want the tool closest to the original Lazarus workflow, install Typio Form Recovery Reboot. If you use Firefox, Lazarus itself is still maintained there. If you want per site control, credential refusal you cannot switch off and restores that survive React and Vue, use Form ReDraft. If you manage long histories with search and export, look at Form History Control II. Read on for why.

Lazarus: the original

Lazarus saved everything you typed and recovered it from an icon, with version history per field, pinned entries, export and import, and a vault lock. It skipped search boxes to keep the vault clean and worked across modern web apps including shadow DOM. It was removed from the Chrome Web Store when Chrome deprecated Manifest V2 extensions in 2025.

It did not disappear entirely. A maintained version lives on Firefox, updated in August 2026, with the same local storage model: everything stays on your device, with no external servers and no tracking. If your browser is Firefox and your needs are conventional forms, it remains a reasonable choice.

Typio Form Recovery Reboot: the community fork

The original Typio had been unmaintained since 2020 and was removed from the store with the Manifest V2 deprecation. Typio Form Recovery Reboot is a community fork that migrated to Manifest V3 in March 2026 and is published on the Chrome Web Store again.

It keeps the original workflow: silent saving as you type, a restore icon on focus, right click access to recent entries, a recovery dialog with search, session recovery for a whole page, customisable shortcuts, a site blacklist with wildcard and regex support, retention up to a year, a save indicator and support for iframes and shadow DOM. Everything is stored locally with no server involved.

Its weakness is the one it inherited. Content editable fields are best recovered through the dialog rather than automatic restore, and heavily dynamic editors can behave differently depending on how the site rewrites the page. Test it on your sites rather than assuming coverage.

Form Recover and Form History Control II

Form Recover is a newer tool built for the modern web, with local first storage, encryption at rest, support for single page apps and rich text editors including React apps, a contextual restore icon, adaptive version history and an optional privacy lock. Its listing states that it ignores password inputs, hidden fields and common payment fields.

Form History Control II takes a different angle. It is a history manager first: autosave while typing, then search, view, edit, clean up, export and import of entries, plus a form filler for reuse. If your problem is managing years of saved values rather than recovering one lost paragraph, that tooling matters more than the restore animation.

How they compare on the things that matter

Credential refusal

This is the question that decides trust. Form ReDraft refuses password fields, hidden fields, card fields, one time code fields and CSS masked fields before reading the value, and the refusal cannot be switched off. It also blocks suffixed names such as pwd1 and otp2 and compound names such as cardnumber and dateofbirth. Form Recover states that it ignores password inputs, hidden fields and common payment fields. For Typio Reboot, Lazarus and Form History Control II, check the current listing for credential handling before trusting them with sensitive pages, because this is exactly where older tools failed.

Where recording happens

Typio Reboot is active on all pages once installed, with a blacklist to carve out exceptions. Form ReDraft inverts this: it records nothing until you choose, either per site or everywhere except a blocked list of banking, payment, email and identity sites. If your threat model includes your bank and your inbox, the default matters more than the toggle.

Modern site coverage

Late rendered fields, shadow roots, iframes and rich text editors are where recoveries live or die. Lazarus and Typio Reboot both state shadow DOM support. Form Recover states React and rich text editor support. Form ReDraft observes continuously rather than once at load, matches on labels when identifiers churn, and restores through the native setter with input and change events so frameworks keep the text. Whatever you install, run the Quora test: type into a single page app, reload and see what comes back.

Getting text back

Lazarus uses an icon with version history and pinned entries. Typio Reboot uses right click restore, a recovery dialog and session recovery. Form Recover shows a contextual icon only when a draft exists. Form ReDraft shows a badge beside the empty field with the word count, restores in one click, and carries drafts across pages by opening the source page. Form History Control II gives you search, edit and export over the whole archive. Pick the workflow that matches how you lose text: one paragraph needs one click, while years of values need search.

Privacy model

All five tools keep data on your device with no server in the loop. The differences are in the details. Form ReDraft encrypts drafts with AES GCM, redacts recognisable secrets inside ordinary prose, caps storage at 4 MB by default and refuses private windows unless you allow them. Lazarus offers PIN vault protection. Form Recover encrypts at rest with an optional privacy lock. Typio Reboot and Form History Control II state local storage. Verify each claim in the listing rather than taking any article's word for it, including this one.

Which should you choose

• Closest to classic Lazarus on Chrome: Typio Form Recovery Reboot, for the right click and dialog workflow.
• Firefox users: Lazarus itself, still maintained there.
• Strictest recording control: Form ReDraft, for record nothing by default and per site toggles.
• Framework heavy sites: Form Recover or Form ReDraft, tested on your actual editors.
• Archive management: Form History Control II, for search, edit and export.

Whichever you pick, run the same three checks from what separates a tool you can trust: credentials refused with no override, no network requests, and a restore your framework keeps after the next render.

FAQ

Is Lazarus Form Recovery still available?

The original Chrome version was removed with the Manifest V2 deprecation in 2025. A maintained version lives on Firefox, updated in August 2026, with local storage, export and import and PIN vault protection.

What replaced Typio Form Recovery?

Typio Form Recovery Reboot, a community fork migrated to Manifest V3 in March 2026. It keeps right click restore and a recovery dialog, with local storage and a site blacklist.

Do form recovery tools work on modern single page apps?

Only the ones built for them. Tools that attach listeners once at page load miss fields rendered later, fields inside shadow roots and rich text editors. Test any tool on the sites you actually use before trusting it.

Which form recovery extension is most private?

Judge by three checks: credentials refused before they are read, everything stored on your own device with no network requests, and per site control so banking and email pages stay untouched.

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