Claude Code users are reporting that the app is deleting chat history without warning. It turns out that you need to change a default setting that the platform didn't even bother to warn users about.
Claude Code users are reporting that the app is deleting chat history without warning. It turns out that you need to change a default setting that the platform didn't even bother to warn users about.
A number of open tickets have appeared on the Claude Code GitHub repository over the past few months, in which users report the sudden disappearance of conversation transcripts. The problem seems to be with the cleanupPeriodDays configuration option. By default, it is set to 30 days and runs every time Claude Code starts, permanently deleting all .jsonl files that it considers “outdated,” The Register reports .
Anthropic hinted that the fault lies with users themselves for not looking at the documentation. The company said that the 30-day data purge policy has been in place since Claude launched as a security measure, and it is clearly stated in the instructions.
“Storing text transcripts of coding sessions on disk indefinitely poses real security and privacy risks because they can contain source code, credentials, and other sensitive information,” the company said in a statement. “The default 30-day retention period is a balance between being able to recover recent work and not keeping this data on disk longer than necessary. This decision has been part of Claude Code’s architecture since launch, specifically as a security measure.”
This wouldn't be such a big deal if Claude Code had managed to warn unsuspecting users that their 30-day chat history with the bot would be erased the next time they launched the app, or at least made them aware of the existence of such a setting. However, users claim that this is not the case.
“The cleanup works out of the box — with no warnings during installation or dialogs on first run,” wrote GitHub user FTSBrand in his initial post (which later became the main thread discussing the issue). “Users who consider their conversation history to be a reliable source of working knowledge are simply quietly mistaken about the data retention model.”
Another user in his own discussion thread reports that the code and git history of the project remained in place after the cleanup, "but the entire chain of reasoning — architecture discussion, debugging context, analytics — disappeared."
“For research work, this context is the main result,” noted GitHub user joekhochstetter.
It seems that this cleaning function does not provide any possibility of recovery at all: there is no temporary deletion to the "trash", no grace period, no rollback option. Moreover, judging by user complaints, the program does not even keep a log of deleted files, so people are completely deprived of the opportunity to check what exactly disappeared after the next cleaning.
A root cause analysis by GitHub user ojura suggests that the deletion is tied to mtime (modification time) of the transcript file, rather than the actual timestamp of its last activity.
“Since mtimes can be changed externally, anything that affects it completely changes the result: restoring from a backup, a sync client, or a script that sets mtimes to the actual (old) date of the last session. This makes the current session look outdated, and during the next check it is simply silently deleted,” explains ojura.
The only solution suggested in the thread is to make sure that Claude Code transcripts are copied, with users suggesting several different workarounds. However, some developers are not happy with this, demanding that the bug itself be fixed.
“Backups are good hygiene, but they are no substitute for product-level awareness of destructive data cleaning,” writes GitHub user caioribeiroclw-pixel.
