Can I recover a deleted Claude Code session?

Not from Claude Code: the transcript is one file, deletion removes it, and there is no archive to restore from. What can be recovered is a session that only looks deleted — moved to another project directory, swept by cleanupPeriodDays, written by a headless client, or living under a different config directory — plus whatever a backup or an index read before the file went.

Why did my Claude Code sessions disappear?

The usual cause is cleanupPeriodDays, which removes transcripts after 30 days by default. The second is renaming or moving the project: the directory name under ~/.claude/projects encodes the absolute path, so the old sessions are still on disk under the old encoded name and --resume in the new path lists nothing.

Where is a session that claude --resume does not list?

Look under ~/.claude/projects for a directory encoding the old path, in ~/.claude/transcripts where headless and SDK clients write, and — on a Mac with Xcode — under ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/CodingAssistant/ClaudeAgentConfig. A CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR set in one shell and not another moves all of it.

Does deja recover deleted sessions?

It keeps what it indexed. A transcript deja read before the file went stays searchable and readable through deja show, because the index does not follow a single file out the door. It cannot recover a session it never read.

How to recover a deleted Claude Code session

four reasons a session is missing from claude --resume, three of which are not deletion

claude --resume builds its list from the files on disk, so a session missing from it means the file is missing from where Claude Code looked. That is not the same as gone, and it is worth ruling out the three cheap explanations before accepting the expensive one.

Was it deleted, or is it somewhere else

Four causes, in the order they actually happen:

The 30-day sweep. cleanupPeriodDays in ~/.claude/settings.json defaults to 30 days and removes older transcripts, with nothing announcing it. If that is what happened, the file is gone — see what the sweep does.
The project moved or was renamed. A directory under ~/.claude/projects encodes the project's absolute path, with separators and literal hyphens both turned into -. Rename the repository and the old sessions stay under the old encoded name; --resume in the new path has nothing to list.
A different config directory. CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR set in one shell and not in another splits your history into two trees.
A headless or SDK session. Those write under <config>/transcripts/ rather than projects/, and Xcode-hosted Claude writes under ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/CodingAssistant/ClaudeAgentConfig.

Finding the file

# every transcript tree, by newest file
find ~/.claude -name '*.jsonl' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -t | head

# the project directories, to spot the encoded old path
ls ~/.claude/projects | grep -i <repo-name>

# by session id, if you have it from a log or a screenshot
grep -rl '<session-id>' ~/.claude 2>/dev/null

If the file turns up under an old encoded directory, moving it into the current one puts the session back in --resume: the list is the directory, not a database.

What is genuinely recoverable

If the file is gone, the honest list is short. A filesystem snapshot or backup taken while it existed. The Trash, if it was deleted from a file manager rather than with rm. And anything that read the transcript before it went.

That last one is the only reliable answer, and it has to be in place beforehand. deja indexes the transcripts every agent on this machine writes, so a session it has already read stays searchable after the original is swept or deleted — deja "what the session was about", then deja show <id> for the transcript it kept. Only deja forget drops one on purpose. There is no version of this that recovers a session nothing ever read.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh
deja install --auto

The first index reads the history already on disk, so it covers the sessions you have now rather than starting from today.

Deleting sessions, and what it costs · Where every agent stores history · Resuming yesterday's session

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