Desktop app sidebar loses all session history after restart

After quitting and reopening Claude Desktop (macOS), the sidebar shows "Sessions you start will show up here" with no session history, despite 100+ sessions existing on disk.

Evidence that data is intact

• ~/.claude/projects/<project>/ contains 102 .jsonl transcript files
• ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/ contains 466 files
• ~/.claude/sessions/ shows an active session entry
• The app's overview stats still show correct totals (122 sessions, 21K messages, 41 active days)

Likely cause

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/Session Storage/ LevelDB appears freshly created (all files timestamped at app launch) — suggests the session index was wiped/not rebuilt from existing transcript files on disk.

Expected behavior

App should rebuild the sidebar session list from existing transcript files on disk, or persist the index durably across restarts.

Environment

• macOS (Darwin 25.5.0)
• Claude Desktop v2.1.187
• Sessions were created in Claude Desktop (not CLI) — confirmed via "entrypoint":"claude-desktop" in session metadata

Workaround

None available from the UI. Transcripts can still be searched programmatically via .jsonl files.