[BUG] All sessions lost after Claude Desktop update on Windows (data intact on disk)

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

After updating Claude Desktop on Windows, all previous sessions disappeared from the sidebar — both active and archived. The session data files (.jsonl) are still present on disk but the app doesn't load them.

Environment:

OS: Windows 11 Pro (Build 26200)
Claude Code version: 2.1.81
Claude Desktop: latest (auto-updated on 2026-03-25)

Workaround tried: Full quit and restart of Claude Desktop — did not help.

What Should Happen?

Expected behavior: Sessions should persist across app updates.

What I see on disk:

27 session .jsonl files are still present in ~/.claude/projects/C--Users-samik-24rent-24rent-projects/. Session dates range from March 3 to March 25, 2026. Files are not empty (ranging from 362KB to 40MB).

However, AppData/Roaming/Claude/claude-code-sessions/ only contains 1 session (created after the update). The app appears to have lost its session index while the raw data survived.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

Steps to reproduce:

Had 27 active/archived sessions in my main project
Claude Desktop auto-updated
Reopened Claude Desktop
Sidebar shows zero sessions — no active, no archived

Claude Model

Opus

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.81

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Windows

Terminal/Shell

PowerShell

Additional Information

_No response_