I'm not quite following your description. We have two different features, let's call them "browsing history" and "open tabs", and I'm not quite sure which one you're talking about. Maybe both.

For "open tabs", we never "replace" anything. You could have 1 or 2 or 10 or 20 devices, and we're going to show them all. The important caveat is that your device has to have been active in the last 14 days, otherwise we remove its data from the "open tabs" area. The idea here is that if a device has been inactive for 2 weeks, the user probably doesn't want to see it anything. For example, if you uninstall and reinstall chrome on a device, your new installation is going to be treated as a separate device for your "open tabs". And the old installation will linger there, never changing. We don't want to let that old/stale/bad data clutter your UI forever, so after 2 weeks we remove it.

The "browsing history" on the other hand, and that's what you can scroll through way way back, is not separated by device. Assuming you have an internet connection and you've turned on syncing history, it should be displaying a merged view from all your devices. At least on desktop, not sure on mobile, you can click the little dropdown arrow next to it, and the popup should have a line about the device the page navigation came from (if it didn't come from your current device). I think this only goes back ~3 months, not sure.

The other important thing to know is that if you go to Settings -> Show advanced settings... -> Privacy -> Clear browsing data... -> check Browsing history -> Clear browsing data, it's going to clear out all your shared history between all your syncing devices. Each device, I think, will still its own local history (other than the device you use to clear out browsing history).

Let us know if you still think something is going wrong, and let us know which of the two features you're missing data from.

That's the best explanation I've found so far; thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have evidence that the device was online within 14 days since I realized this - however I'm pretty sure it was.

I'm describing "Nexus 5" disappearing in history when migrating to a Nexus 6. When I realized my tabs weren't transferred from N5's Chrome to N6's chrome I started digging through history using a computer and the N6 - and I could find no remnants of the N5.

If this isn't a bug and can't be reproduced, then it must have been more than a 14 day delay before I dug through the history.

Closing as wont fix, since there's nothing actionable. I'm sorry you've lost data :(

If you still have your Nexus 5 device you could always power it back up, open Chrome, and it'll re-sync all of it's open tab data.

Is it actionable that tabs don't get migrated when using Google's migrate (to new Android device) feature? This should be pretty easy to test, though I don't currently have unused devices to test it with.

You are right, that seems like a reasonable thing for Chrome to do. I've never used the Android apps/data migration feature. Changing the component, this is no longer a Sync issue. It seems reasonable, at least to me, that this migration feature should carry over the sessions/tabs data of what pages are currently open.

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